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Mr. Hongzhang Xu is a research fellow at the Deakin University, a member of the Australian Centre on China in the World, and a Ph.D. scholar at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at The Australian National University. His research considers how our societies approach sustainable development as an intertwined socio–ecological system can adapt to and benefit from changes based on the underlying power relations and cultural values that are integral to social change and to the institutional dynamics that mediate human–environment relations.
The adverse effects of rapid urbanization are of global concern. Careful planning for and accommodation of accelerating urbanization and citizenization (i.e., migrants gaining official urban residency) may be the best approach to limit some of the worst impacts. However, we find that another trajectory may be possible: one linked to the rural development plan adopted in the latest Chinese national development strategy. This plan aims to build rural areas as attractive areas for settlement by 2050 rather than to further urbanize with more people in cities. We assess the political motivations and challenges behind this choice to develop rural areas based on a literature review and empirical case analysis. After assessing the rural and urban policy subsystem, we find five socio-political drivers behind China’s rural development strategy, namely ensuring food security, promoting culture and heritage, addressing overcapacity, emphasizing environmental protection and eradicating poverty. To develop rural areas, China needs to effectively resolve three dilemmas: (1) implementing decentralized policies under central supervision; (2) deploying limited resources efficiently to achieve targets; and (3) addressing competing narratives in current policies. Involving more rural community voices, adopting multiple forms of local governance, and identifying and mitigating negative project impacts can be the starting points to manage these dilemmas.
Hongzhang Xu; Jamie Pittock; Katherine Daniell. China: A New Trajectory Prioritizing Rural Rather Than Urban Development? Land 2021, 10, 514 .
AMA StyleHongzhang Xu, Jamie Pittock, Katherine Daniell. China: A New Trajectory Prioritizing Rural Rather Than Urban Development? Land. 2021; 10 (5):514.
Chicago/Turabian StyleHongzhang Xu; Jamie Pittock; Katherine Daniell. 2021. "China: A New Trajectory Prioritizing Rural Rather Than Urban Development?" Land 10, no. 5: 514.
Building landscape resilience inspires the cultivation of the landscape’s capacity to recover from disruption and live with changes and uncertainties. However, integrating ecosystem and society within such a unified lens—that is, socio–ecological system (SES) resilience—clashes with many cornerstone concepts in social science, such as power, democracy, rights, and culture. In short, a landscape cannot provide the same values to everyone. However, can building landscape resilience be an effective and just environmental management strategy? Research on this question is limited. A scoping literature review was conducted first to synthesise and map landscape management change based on 111,653 records. Then, we used the Nuozhadu (NZD) catchment as a case study to validate our findings from the literature. We summarised current critiques and created a framework including seven normative categories, or common difficulties, namely resilience for “whom”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why”, as well as “can” and “how” we apply resilience normatively. We found that these difficulties are overlooked and avoided despite their instructive roles to achieve just landscape management more transparently. Without clear targets and boundaries in building resilience, we found that some groups consume resources and services at the expense of others. The NZD case demonstrates that a strategy of building the NZD’s resilience has improved the conservation of the NZD’s forest ecosystems but overlooked trade-offs between sustaining people and the environment, and between sustainable development for people at different scales. Future researchers, managers, and decision-makers are thereby needed to think resilience more normatively and address the questions in the “seven difficulties” framework before intervening to build landscape resilience.
Hongzhang Xu; Meng Peng; Jamie Pittock; Jiayu Xu. Managing Rather Than Avoiding “Difficulties” in Building Landscape Resilience. Sustainability 2021, 13, 2629 .
AMA StyleHongzhang Xu, Meng Peng, Jamie Pittock, Jiayu Xu. Managing Rather Than Avoiding “Difficulties” in Building Landscape Resilience. Sustainability. 2021; 13 (5):2629.
Chicago/Turabian StyleHongzhang Xu; Meng Peng; Jamie Pittock; Jiayu Xu. 2021. "Managing Rather Than Avoiding “Difficulties” in Building Landscape Resilience." Sustainability 13, no. 5: 2629.
Damming rivers addresses a range of society’s needs, but at the cost of fragmentation and other negative effects on freshwater ecosystems. This article examines hydropower development and fish conservation in the Upper Yangtze River Basin to explore strategies for managing dams more sustainably at the basin scale. We highlight the need to limit the effects of hydropower dams on freshwater biodiversity, and that protecting fish in reserves could be one of the most effective approaches to limiting the ecological effects of dams on fish. However, in the Yangtze River basin there are dams on the rivers in all but 1 of the 14 fish reserves mapped in this study, thus compromising the effectiveness of the reserves. In addition, the removal of some dams may not be as effective as suggested. Thus, we propose that limiting dam construction in protected tributaries is a ready-to-adopt conservation strategy. However, the adoption of this policy by the Chinese government will be determined by which of two competing policy changes (i.e. gradual or sudden) in the policy subsystem of dam construction will prevail. In this paper we illustrate how greater triage in the Upper Yangtze River Basin can deliver services to people and conserve freshwater biodiversity.
Hongzhang Xu; Jamie Pittock. Policy changes in dam construction and biodiversity conservation in the Yangtze River Basin, China. Marine and Freshwater Research 2021, 72, 228 .
AMA StyleHongzhang Xu, Jamie Pittock. Policy changes in dam construction and biodiversity conservation in the Yangtze River Basin, China. Marine and Freshwater Research. 2021; 72 (2):228.
Chicago/Turabian StyleHongzhang Xu; Jamie Pittock. 2021. "Policy changes in dam construction and biodiversity conservation in the Yangtze River Basin, China." Marine and Freshwater Research 72, no. 2: 228.
China’s coal consumption has made up more than 70% of China’s energy assumption since 1978, and it accounts for approximately 21% of global carbon emissions in 2017. How China reach clean air targets, fulfill its commitment to reduce CO2 emission in the Paris Agreement, and achieve higher targets, such as peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero emission by 2060? A range of sustainability experiments have been conducted to support China’s sustainability transition. As the biggest one among them, the Yangtze River Economic Belt runs across the middle of the country from east to west, with an area of 2,050,000 km2 or 21.39% of China’s territory, and covers 11 provinces and cities. Although many studies have been conducted relevant to the Belt, few studies have described the research landscape, trends, and relevant topics of interest and gaps. To address these gaps, we review, synthesize, and analyze the latest publications on the Belt and find environmental governance has been the key topic in current publications. Significantly, atmospheric and climate governance may be used as a lens to understand China’s environmental governance, human-environmental interactions and trade-offs between environmental protection and socio-economic development in the Belt. Based on this lens, we find that: I. current research on the Belt has started and increased rapidly in the past five years, but our knowledge on it as a cross-boundary, cross-level and cross-sector sustainability experiment is somewhat limited; II. distribution of risk and responsibility across different regions in atmospheric and climate governance has not been well-addressed; III. new carbon emission accounting methods, especially methods based on a consumption-based approach, could be adopted to offer more comprehensive and just understandings about sectoral differences and environmental benefits; IV. influence of topography and meteorology on ambient air quality in the Belt cannot be ignored and should be included by the following research; and V. trade-offs and competing interests among different actors should be recognized and balanced to facilitate sustainable industrial upgrading, innovation and transforming without compromising individual well-being and regional development.
Meng Peng; Hongzhang Xu; Chenfei Qu; Jiayu Xu; Liurui Chen; Lei Duan; Jiming Hao. Understanding China’s largest sustainability experiment: Atmospheric and climate governance in the Yangtze river economic belt as a lens. Journal of Cleaner Production 2020, 290, 125760 .
AMA StyleMeng Peng, Hongzhang Xu, Chenfei Qu, Jiayu Xu, Liurui Chen, Lei Duan, Jiming Hao. Understanding China’s largest sustainability experiment: Atmospheric and climate governance in the Yangtze river economic belt as a lens. Journal of Cleaner Production. 2020; 290 ():125760.
Chicago/Turabian StyleMeng Peng; Hongzhang Xu; Chenfei Qu; Jiayu Xu; Liurui Chen; Lei Duan; Jiming Hao. 2020. "Understanding China’s largest sustainability experiment: Atmospheric and climate governance in the Yangtze river economic belt as a lens." Journal of Cleaner Production 290, no. : 125760.
China has planned 23 dams on the main stream of the Lancang (upper Mekong) River. The Chinese Government’s Thirteenth Five-Year Plan on Hydroelectricity Development (TFP) has goals to mitigate adverse effects on freshwater biodiversity. These measures are of international importance because China is the largest developer of hydropower projects. Herein we analyse the effects of the existing and planned dams on the fish fauna in the Lancang River. Drawing on development documents, the different types of mitigation measures on the proposed cascade of dams are assessed against the goals of the TFP. We find that: (1) migratory species (25% of total) are severely affected and there are few effective mitigation measures to conserve them; (2) a further 20% of species may be affected by lack of thermal pollution control or mitigation of peaking flow releases in the main stream; (3) fortunately, most species (81.14%) can be protected in tributary nature reserves in the lower Lancang, but many (54.4%) are inadequately protected in the upper Lancang; and (4) none of the 20 dams for which there is information meet all the five TFP conservation goals. There are lessons for mitigating the effects on biodiversity of Chinese-financed hydropower dams inside and outside China.
Hongzhang Xu; Jamie Pittock. Limiting the effects of hydropower dams on freshwater biodiversity: options on the Lancang River, China. Marine and Freshwater Research 2019, 70, 169 .
AMA StyleHongzhang Xu, Jamie Pittock. Limiting the effects of hydropower dams on freshwater biodiversity: options on the Lancang River, China. Marine and Freshwater Research. 2019; 70 (2):169.
Chicago/Turabian StyleHongzhang Xu; Jamie Pittock. 2019. "Limiting the effects of hydropower dams on freshwater biodiversity: options on the Lancang River, China." Marine and Freshwater Research 70, no. 2: 169.