Thematic Issue: Environment and Health in China—I

Abstract

Combining and solving environment and health is a major issue in China—a country with tremendous economic development perspectives. Recent developments (e.g., the Tianjin Harbor accident in August 2015) show that China is investing more and more resources and efforts to cope with the industrial development (GDP) into alliancing with environmental safeguarding. The Thematic Issue on Environment and Health in China is a starting point for discussion of a variety of environmental issues, such as distribution and fractionation of rare earth elements in soil–water system and human blood (Li et al. 2014a, b, c, d); spatial evaluation of phosphorus retention in riparian zones using remote sensing data concerning the big and scarce data issues (Dong et al. 2014); toxicity contamination and distribution in soils and plants (Li et al. 2014a, b, c, d); the status and challenges of water pollution problems in China: learning from the European experience (Zhou et al. 2014); the Heihe River basin (Xiao et al. 2014), identifying interactions between river water and groundwater in the North China Plain using multiple tracers (Dun et al. 2014); potential hazardous elements (PHEs) in atmospheric particulate matter (APM) in the south of Xi’an during the dust episodes of (2001–2012) chemical fractionation; ecological and health risk assessment (Li et al. 2014a, b, c, d), occurrence and hydrogeochemistry of fluoride in alluvial aquifer of Weihe River (Li et al. 2014a, b, c, d); contamination assessment and health risk of heavy metals in dust from Changqing industrial park of Baoji (Wang et al. 2014a, b); contamination assessment and health risk of heavy metals in dust from Changqing industrial park of Baoji (Su et al. 2014); sources and transports of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the Nanshan Underground River, China (Alam et al. 2014); introducing a land-use-based spatial analysis method for human health risk evaluation of soil heavy metals (Wang et al. 2013a, b, c);