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  • McCabe Bullard posted an update 10 months, 2 weeks ago

    To adequately assess the future changes, various flood protection levels and three scenarios for each level of protection were employed, which represent the socio-economic and climate change. The findings revealed that if there is no flood protection, a 2-year flood has a 50% probability of flood occurrence in any given area and may cause no significant impact on GDP, population, and urban damage. Similarly, the probability of a flood occurrence in a five-year flood is 20%, which may cause the country’s GDP about $20.4 billion, with 8.4 million population at risk and $1.4 billion urban damage. Furthermore, a 10-year flood has a 10% probability of flood occurrence and may affect the national GDP by $28.9 billion, with 11.9 million affected population and $2.4 billion urban damage in Pakistan. The government of Pakistan should devise appropriate climate change policies, improve disaster preparedness, build new dams, and update relevant departments to mitigate the adverse effects of flooding.Ambient air pollutants have been linked to adverse health outcomes, but evidence is still relatively rare in college students. Upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) is a common disease of respiratory system among college students. In this study, we assess the acute effect of air pollution on clinic visits of college students for URTI in Wuhan, China. Data on clinic visits due to URTI were collected from Wuhan University Hospital, meteorological factors (including daily temperature and relative humidity) provided by Wuhan Meteorological Bureau, and air pollutants by Wuhan Environmental Protection Bureau. In the present study, generalized additive model with a quasi-Poisson distribution link function was used to examine the association between ambient air pollutants (fine particulate matter (PM2.5), particulate matter (PM10), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone (O3)) and the daily number of clinic visits of college students for URTI at Wuhan University Hospital in Wuhan, China. AZD6244 In the meautants in our two-pollutant models, where the effect value of SO2 after inclusion of O3 appeared to be the largest and the effects of NO2 were also obvious compared with the other pollutants. Subgroups analysis demonstrated that males were more vulnerable to PM10 and O3, while females seemed more vulnerable to exposure to SO2 and NO2. This study implied that short-term exposure to ambient air pollution was associated with increased risk of URTI among college students at Wuhan University Hospital in Wuhan, China. And gaseous pollutants had more negative health impact than solid pollutants. SO2 and NO2 were the major air pollutants affecting the daily number of clinic visits on URTI, to which females seemed more vulnerable than males.Although El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) has been widely confirmed to have significant impacts on climate change in Asia, it is unknown whether the climate change in the Yangtze River Basin (YTR basin) is related to the operation of the Three Gorges Reservoir, which is the world’s largest hydropower station. In this study, we used the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) as an indicator of climate change and found that the mutation period of the YTR basin was 2003-2006 based on three mutation tests. By analyzing the trends of the SPEI and five related meteorological factors before and after 2003, it was found that the construction of the Three Gorges Reservoir increased the relative humidity and provided a more humid climate for the downstream basin. The relationships between drought events and ENSO and the water level of the reservoir indicated that the basin was more prone to drought in El Niño years and the Three Gorges Reservoir could alleviate agricultural drought in the downstream basin. The spatial impacts of the Three Gorges Reservoir on regional climate change were more pronounced, while the impact of ENSO could not be reflected at the station scale.Contrary to the fact that NO3–N can serve as electron acceptor to promote organics degradation, it was also found NO3–N reduction does not necessarily promote organics degradation. We speculate nitrogen (N) species may control the interaction between NO3–N reduction and organics degradation via shifting related microbial community structure. To prove the hypothesis, oxic-anoxic transition zone (OATZ) microcosms simulated by lake water and sediment were conducted with the addition of N species (NO3–N, NO2–N, and NH4+-N) and aniline as typical organics. High-throughput sequencing was used to analyze the microbial community structure and functional enzyme in the microcosms. Results show that, NO2–N inhibited NO3–N reduction while enhanced aniline degradation. For NH4+-N, it promoted NO3–N reduction when NH4+-N/NO3–N concentration ratio ≤ 2 and inhibited aniline degradation when NH4+-N/aniline concentration ratio ≥ 0.5. The presence of NO2–N or NH4+-N weakened the interaction between NO3–N reduction and aniline degradation, which might be caused by significant changes in the diversity and abundance of microbial communities controlled by N species. The microbial mechanism indicates that NO2–N weakened the interaction by affecting both denitrification enzyme activity and electron transfer capability, while NH4+-N weakened the interaction mainly by affecting electron transfer capability. These results imply that N species, as well as other electron acceptors and donors, in the contaminated OATZ should be fully considered, when performing in situ remediation technology of NO3–N reduction.Government information transparency is taken as a prominent instrument of environmental regulation in Chinese cities, especially in the current digital age. However, polluters’ strategic emission and production behaviors across cities, confronted with changing information disclosure level, might make the policy’s effect unexpected in practice. While many existing studies have explored the impact of institutions on pollution, government information disclosure only attracted little attention from empirical studies. Using the method framework of the spatial Durbin model, this study empirically investigates the impact of government information transparency on sulfur dioxide emissions with samples of 264 Chinese cities from 2005 to 2012. We find that a city’s government information transparency negatively relates to its local emission level of sulfur dioxide. Moreover, a city’s sulfur dioxide emissions positively relate to its neighboring cities’ government information transparency levels. The further calculations of marginal effects show that the average of such a direct and local impact of government information transparency outweighs the average indirect effect a city receives from its neighboring cities, making government information transparency benefits to pollution abatement in total.