Is it feasible for China to enhance its air quality in terms of the efficiency and the regulatory cost of air pollution?

Northeast Asia is the most dynamic region in the world owing to its steady economic development and resultant air pollution. The Chinese government has expended much effort in addressing environmental issues. An important question for China is how much air pollution it can reduce and at what cost.

Warning of negative effects of land-use changes on ecological security based on GIS.

Urbanization leads to dramatic changes in regional land-use patterns and threatens regional ecological security. Based on GIS and existing key ecological spaces, timely threat warnings to regional ecological spaces caused by artificial land-use changes and the identification of appropriate precautionary measures are necessary for the sustainable development of regional land resources. Taking 2010 as the base year, the study forecasts the demand for new construction land in the surveyed region in 2015 and 2030 using a Markov model; on this basis, a logistic cellular automata (CA) model is built to forecast the land use distribution related to construction land expansion and requisition-compensationbalanceofcultivated land.