Current Environmental Situation Research Articles

The Quantification of Non-Action Costs as an Incentive to Address Water Pollution Problems

Diffuse pollution is one type of pollution generated by agricultural, livestock, and urban runoff that is responsible for surface and groundwater pollution. As a result, the exposed population develops different diseases that affect their short, medium, and long-term quality of life. Researchers need to be able to assess the loss of quality of life in monetary terms to include this social impact in decision-making processes. Specifically, if no measure is implemented to correct the situation, these costs can be considered as the non-action costs of the social impact of water pollution. This study assesses the importance of measuring healthcare costs as a proxy for non-action costs for the economic assessment of water pollution consequences. Thanks to this analysis, it is possible to identify the health costs produced by the current environmental situation, making it possible to obtain an economic baseline scenario prior to the implementation of any project or measure. This approach is a novelty in the literature since, to date, healthcare costs have not been related to non-action costs. Including these costs in economic feasibility studies allow us to assess in detail both the social impact of pollution and the social benefits of develop water-quality improvement projects.

Light Environment Evaluation and Optimization of College Classrooms from a Dual-Carbon Perspective

Under the background of the country's vigorous advocacy of “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality”, in order to understand the current situation of the light environment of university classrooms and provide reference for the direction and measures of the improvement of university classrooms, this paper selected a typical classroom in a university in Henan province to carry out subjective and objective assessment of the light environment. Objectively, from two aspects of daylighting coefficient and artificial lighting measurement, the results show that the average illumination and evenness of the classroom are lower than the national standard value under the condition of natural lighting and night lighting. Subjectively, a questionnaire survey was conducted on the classroom light environment of the students who have used the classroom, and it was concluded that under both natural lighting and night lighting conditions, most of the students believed that the subjective feeling of the classroom light environment was poor, and the classroom light environment needed to be improved.In addition, the paper uses DIALux software to optimize the light environment according to the current situation, and simulates the current situation and optimization measures of the light environment of the classroom, so that the classroom can realize the requirements of energy saving while meeting the comfort of the indoor light environment.

Problems and Significance of Marine Environment Monitoring

At this stage, compared with developed countries, China's Water environment monitoring technology is still in a relatively backward development trend. The improvement of Water environment monitoring technology requires a long process of accumulating experience. The construction of marine ecological civilization as a new cognitive concept has been raised to a national strategy, in which marine environmental monitoring is an important technical means to cognize the current situation of marine environment and guarantee the construction of marine ecological civilization, but compared with developed countries, certain monitoring technologies in China are still immature and some monitoring systems have not been perfected. Therefore, how to improve the quality of marine environmental monitoring, integrate marine monitoring team and build a three-dimensional marine monitoring system has become an important prerequisite for the implementation of ecological civilization construction.

Practical Research on the Reform of Learning and Teaching under the Background of Informatization

In the information age, in order to adapt to the requirements of contemporary education information and the transformation of educational methods under information conditions, it has become a hot topic in education and teaching research. According to the understanding of the current situation of the informatization environment in colleges and universities, some problems in the transformation of the teaching methods in colleges and universities under the condition of informatization are revealed. For example, teachers don't have a good understanding of information development, college teachers' information technology cannot meet the requirements of teaching method innovation, and colleges and universities information-based teaching equipment is not perfect. To solve this problem, three solutions are given.

Development of Urban Park Public Seating Design Strategies in the Post-pandemic Era

Urban parks have the characteristics of a relatively concentrated population. Seating as products with a high frequency of public use, they have significantly influenced residents’ activities in the epidemic environment. The current design of public seating in parks during the pandemic needs to meet the needs of different people. Thus, the purpose of this research is to meet the needs of the different populations in many aspects of urban park seating objects during the pandemic. This paper integrates literature to develop an urban park seating object strategy in the post-pandemic era. This paper analyses the design factors and design strategies of urban park seating from four aspects based on the current situation of the post-pandemic social environment. The four areas are function, aesthetics, materials, and safe social distance. The results show that the seat’s functional design is crucial. However, aesthetics, materials, and safety cannot be ignored. In addition, people are more concerned about seat safety in the post-pandemic period. Therefore, public seating design strategies for urban parks in the post-pandemic era are developed based on these four aspects.

Smart control system for the precision cultivation of black fungus

Black fungus, with high nutritional and medicinal value, has been cultivated in China for a long time, and Heilongjiang alone accounts for about 40% of the global output. At present, the cultivation of black fungus derives mainly from the inheritance of relatively primitive practices and experience of farmers, resulting in inconsistent quality of fungus. In this study, a smart control system for the precision cultivation of black fungus was designed by using intelligent detection and control technology. The system includes a precision culture test environment and remote control system. The precision cultivation environment contains four sub-independent environments. The key parameters such as temperature, humidity, and light behavior were collected and can be adjusted individually, according to the precision cultivation stages. The intelligent remote control system included a controller cabinet, sensors unit, temperature control unit, humidity control unit, light control unit, and information transmitting unit. The controller cabinet includes a key controller which can auto-control the temperature, humidity, and lightly adjust components according to the precision cultivation conditions and processing. The temperature sensors were installed in a 3D array close to the fungus bags about 5 cm in rooms. The light tape was installed on the six walls and also had three colors (Red, Blue, and Green) which could be controlled independently in each room. The control strategy through the analysis of the data collected by all sensors, the current cultivate situation of the cultivation environment was obtained, and the heater, fan, light, and nozzle were regulated according to the strategy to maintain a suitable precision cultivation environment for fungus. To verify the feasibility of the precision cultivation processing and control system, the test result shows that the error of temperature control was about 0°C-1°C, the error of humidity control was about 1%-4%, and the error of illuminance control was about 0-50 lx; All the verification results show that the control system for precision cultivation has high precision and can meet the needs of exploring the "Black 29" fungus cultivation experiment environment. Based on the orthogonal experiment, the best combination of the temperature and humidity for each growth stage was also investigated in this study, further proving the reliability and feasibility of the control system for the precision cultivation of Auricularia auricula. Keywords: black fungus, precision cultivation, smart control system, growth environment, remote control system, sensor DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20231601.6257 Citation: Jiang Y C, Li J J, Li Y, Li S D, Song X, Wu H Y, et al. Smart control system for the precision cultivation of black fungus. Int J Agric & Biol Eng, 2023; 16(1): 193–202.

Urban Ecological Planning Model Based on Information Entropy and Meteorological Suitability Evaluation Algorithm

In order to improve the effect of regional urban ecological planning and ecological restoration, aiming at the problem of low accuracy of ecological planning and poor matching with the current situation, taking Yucheng County, Shangqiu City, Henan Province as an example, an urban ecological planning model based on information entropy and meteorological suitability evaluation algorithm is designed. The geographical environment of Yucheng County, Shangqiu City, Henan Province is analyzed. Based on the current situation of regional ecological environment, the meteorological suitability evaluation algorithm is introduced to establish the urban ecological planning model. Comprehensively considering land planning factors and meteorological factors, calculate the information entropy of each influencing factor, determine the weight, and optimize the ecological planning model. The experimental results show that this method has achieved good results in the accuracy of ecological planning and the matching degree of the current situation in the urban ecological planning of Yucheng County, Shangqiu City, Henan Province.

ECOLOGICAL JUSTIFICATION OF WASTE-FREE TECHNOLOGIES FOR URBAN WASTEWATER DISPOSAL

The article deals with the issues of waste-free technology of wastewater disposal. Analysis of information on water quality and the state of the ecosystem of Kazakhstan's water bodies shows that most of them are unable to perform their main function – to maintain the geosystem structure formed as a result of prolonged anthropogenic human activity. The reason for the current environmental situation is the management of the economy in accordance with the previously adopted and practically valid technocratic concept of economic development, which does not actually include the thesis of taking into account possible negative consequences for the environment as a result of extensive consumption of resources. In this regard, the consequence for the water resources of Kazakhstan was the loss of water content and the formation of polluted wastewater, the discharge of which has become the norm in the practice of modern wastewater disposal. The ever-increasing flow of pollution, which includes more and more new ingredients, leads to a change in the intensity and direction of the water-body processes in the drainless basins of Kazakhstan. As a result of economic activity, foci of secondary pollution with completely unpredictable properties were formed, which are included in the scope of action of intra-reservoir processes. Currently, scientists are persistently searching for specific innovations or technological schemes for the functioning of enterprises or industrial complex, which will significantly reduce and completely eliminate emissions of harmful anthropogenic substances. In this regard, engineering developments of closed and semi-closed technological cycles, circular water supply systems of enterprises, technical systems with low water and energy consumption, low-waste and non-waste technologies for waste disposal of urban and industrial facilities are considered the most promising

Construction of a parabolic trough concentrator for solar water disinfection

In the context of the current global environmental situation, one of the most relevant problems is undoubtedly that of water, not only because of the strong inequalities imposed by its geographical distribution, both in time and space, but also because of the economic and political decisions that determine our social relationship with this vital liquid (Peña, 2007). One of the biggest problems in the world today is the lack of access to fresh and drinking water. Add to this the problem of water pollution, and the picture gets worse. Pollution is caused by discharged waste, fertilisers, pesticides or chemicals that flow into fresh water and end up polluting salt water as well. In this regard, more than 1 billion people will suffer from water scarcity in the future due to pollution, overpopulation and climate change, which affect the sources of this essential resource (UN, 2020).

Methods For The Formation Of Energy-Efficient Architecture Of Social Objects In World Design Practice

Today, people are increasingly drifting away from nature in an age of accelerated lives and information technology. Only the natural environment can create comfortable, ecological conditions for human life. It has become evident that the biological component of the domain has been noticeably reduced in the big cities, and the appeal to the global architectural community of the ecological and aesthetic aspects of design and construction, which contribute to the comfortable and sustainable development of urban space, has become particularly relevant over the past decades. In a big city, architecture is omnipresent. Hence, the architectural-spatial environment should be solved as much as possible in the context of the natural environment, embodying not only the material needs of a person but also spiritual ones. The current unfavorable environmental, energy, and economic situation in the world requires new methods for designing and building the architecture of new and reconstructed old buildings. The article discusses the issues surrounding the formation of modern energy-efficient architecture in the context of its relationship with the natural environment through the use of modern design solutions. The article is based on surveys of social facilities made by the authors from 2017 to 2021 in Eurasian and European cities. The article analyzes a new mechanism of architectural formation based on the shape formation of an architectural object, the content of the architectural shape, the aesthetics of perception, and the organization of eco-space.

The European Union facing climate change: a window of opportunity for technological development and entrepreneurship

The fight against climate change is one of the significant challenges of the 21st century. The European Union's environmental policy has evolved as the perception of the problem has become more evident. This paper examines the environmental commitments made by the European Union on the global scene to verify its involvement and responsibility in environmental policy. A comprehensive analysis of the European Union's environmental policies compared to other countries has been carried out using a comparative methodological framework of these commitments. The results confirm the European Union's leadership in promoting and implementing policies to combat climate change and environmental sustainability, which therefore opens windows of opportunity for technological development and entrepreneurship. Future lines of research are proposed following the conclusions, considering the current economic and environmental situation in an environment of energy crisis and inflation.

Detecting Carbapenemases in Animal and Food Samples by Droplet Digital PCR.

The presence of carbapenemase-producing bacteria (CPB) in animal hosts and along the food chain may result in the development of reservoirs for human infections. Several CPB strains isolated from animals have been reported, suggesting that transmission and dissemination of the corresponding genes between humans and animals may occur. Animal and food samples have complex backgrounds that hinder the detection of CPB present in low concentrations by standard detection procedures. We evaluated the possibility of detecting blaKPC, blaVIM, and blaOXA-48-like carbapenemases in 286 animal and food samples (faeces from farm and companion animals, raw meat, bivalve molluscs) by culture-based and standard molecular methods and by ddPCR. The proposed ddPCR managed to detect the target genes, also in samples resulting negative to standard methods. While the presence of blaKPC and blaVIM was detected in few samples (~3%), one third of the samples (n = 94/283) carried different variants of blaOXA-48-like genes. A specific and sensitive method such as ddPCR could be suitable to evaluate the current veterinarian and environmental situation and to assess the dynamic transmission and persistence of CPB between animals and humans and vice versa.

Impact of social support on college students' anxiety due to COVID-19 isolation: Mediating roles of perceived risk and resilience in the postpandemic period.

Because of the outbreak of COVID-19, several colleges and universities in Xi'an, China, implemented quarantine measures and closed their gates, which increased anxiety among the students. The Perceived Social Support Scale, Perceived Risk of COVID-19 Pandemic Scale, Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, and Self-Rating Anxiety Scale were used for measurements. SPSS26 and AMOS26 (IBM SPSS AMOS Statistics, New York, United States) were used for data analysis. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the data from the 2,251 respondents and the hypothetical model. The students' perceived social support was discovered to have had a significant negative effect on anxiety. The students' perceived COVID-19 risk and resilience played significant mediating roles in the relationship between social support and anxiety. When college students feel social support and have resilience, they can reduce anxiety during the epidemic stage. Therefore, education administrators and parents should help college students to identify the current situation of the epidemic environment, enrich relevant knowledge.

A Spatiotemporal Analysis of Hainan Island’s 2010–2020 Gross Ecosystem Product Accounting

Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) is a single currency to measure the contribution of an ecosystem to society. It is the sum of the value of products and services provided by the ecosystem to humans. Based on this, GEP characterizes the current situation of the ecological environment in a region and can measure the contribution index provided by ecosystems. Based on land use data, rainfall data, soil data, statistical yearbook, DEM and other data, this paper constructs the accounting framework of Hainan Island’s GEP, quantitatively evaluates Hainan Island’s GEP from 2010 to 2020 and analyzes the research results. The results are as follows: (1) The GEP of Hainan Island’s ecosystem rose from 596.404 billion CNY in 2010 to 1032.096 billion CNY in 2020, an increase of about 42.21% with an average annual growth rate of 6.3%. The overall GEP has shown an upward trend. Among them, the value of regulation service accounts for the largest proportion was up to 73–83%. (2) The overall distribution of GEP in Hainan Island is uneven, decreasing from the central mountainous areas to the eastern coastal areas around to the west. In particular, Danzhou City, Wenchang City and Haikou City have higher values, while Tunchang, Baoting County and Wuzhishan City have lower values, and Wuzhishan City has the lowest values. Hainan Island is rich in natural resources, which contain great value. Through the accounting of GEP, we can clearly determine the value of the ecosystem, which can help the relevant departments estimate the GEP of Hainan Island’s ecosystem. It can provide a reference for Hainan to formulate ecological protection and sustainable development policies, and for the GEP estimation of other islands.

Экологическая обстановка в Москве: оценка динамики общественного мнения по результатам опросов 2013–2022 гг.

In the article, the authors suggest that public interest in environmental issues depends mostly on how favorable or unfavorable the current environmental situation in the city is perceived. In this regard, the authors emphasize studying the attitude of Muscovites to the environmental situation, its change and development prospects. In order to form a more detailed presentation, the data were considered in dynamics. The article analyzes the results of surveys conducted in 2013, 2017 and 2022. The identified trends were assessed using the index method.

The influence of bio-fuels on the injection and combustion processes in a diesel cylinder

Introduction (statement of the problem and relevance). The need for vehicles motor fuels is growing from year to year. Limited oil resources lead to the need to replace them with alternative ones. The necessity to find a solution of the problem is also encouraged by the current unfavorable environmental situation. The possibility of using alternative fuel resources in existing engines requires the study of their influence on various aspects of engine operation, including the process of fuel supply and combustion in the engine cylinder.The purpose of the current research was to obtain the characteristics of fuel supply and combustion in a diesel engine operating on methanol and methyl ester of rapeseed oil.Methodology and research methods. As an object of study, a tractor diesel engine with a dimension of 2Ч 10.5/12.0 air-cooled with volumetric mixing was chosen. The characteristics presented in the work were taken in the nominal mode at the crankshaft speed n = 1800 rpm and the average effective pressure in the cylinder pe = 0.588 MPa, as well as in the maximum torque mode n = 1400 rpm, pe = 0.594 MPa. Pilot fuel supply in all modes was constant and fixed. The fuel injection advance setting angles were also constant and amounted 34° of the crankshaft rotation to the top dead center for each of the fuels.Scientific novelty and results. The article considered the bench tests results of a diesel engine operating on methanol and rapeseed oil methyl ester in two characteristic modes. The indicators of fuel supply and combustion process in the diesel cylinder have been presented. The analysis of these indicators allowed determining the influence of the fuel supply process on the combustion characteristics in the engine.The practical significance lies in the possibility of using the obtained results to improve the operation of diesel engines on alternative renewable fuels.

AdaFusion: Visual-LiDAR Fusion With Adaptive Weights for Place Recognition

Recent years have witnessed the increasing application of place recognition in various environments, such as city roads, large buildings, and a mix of indoor and outdoor places. This task, however, still remains challenging due to the limitations of different sensors and the changing appearance of environments. Current works only consider the use of individual sensors or simply combine different sensors, ignoring the fact that the importance of different sensors varies as the environment changes. In this letter, an adaptive weighting visual-LiDAR fusion method, named AdaFusion, is proposed to learn the weights for both image and point cloud features. Features of these two modalities are thus contributed differently according to the current environmental situation. Weights are learned by the multi-scale attention branch of the network, which is then fused with the multi-modality feature extraction branch. Furthermore, to better utilize the potential relationship between images and point clouds, we design a two-stage fusion approach to combine the 2D and 3D attention. Our work is tested on two public datasets. Experiments show that the adaptive weights help improve recognition accuracy and system robustness to varying environments while being efficient in runtime.

An Analysis of the Impact of E-Commerce Supply Chain Collaboration on the Ecological Environment in Central Plain

Abstract In recent years, the ecological environment has been severely damaged and has evolved into a problem threatening human health due to the construction of the ecological environment. Therefore, studying the eco-environmental (ecological environment) issues in the process of the new eco-environment is of great significance to the comprehensive development of the region. The basic research framework of this article is to ask questions, analyse problems and solve problems. With the rise of e-commerce media platforms as the background, we use case studies and in-depth interviews to discuss the characteristics of the ecological crisis of e-commerce media platforms and analyse them in depth. This paper takes the new ecological environment as the research background, selects six major cities in the Central Plains as the research objects, and digs deep to find out the current ecological and environmental problems in the Central Plains. By citing the PSR (Pressure-State-Response) model, we construct the initial pressure and use the factor analysis method to determine the evaluation index model of the 16 sub-indices. Finally, we use the entropy method to standardise the original indicators. We determine the index weights, etc., to analyse the level of the ecological environment of the six cities. At the same time, this article evaluates the ecological environment in the process of the new ecological environment in the Central Plains. First, an evaluation index system is established, and then the evaluation index weight is determined to obtain the order of the ecological environment problems. According to the total score value of ecological environment quality, for different areas, comprehensive ecological environment zoning is proposed so that resources can be better and rationally developed and utilised. The ecological environment of mining areas is protected and improved to the maximum extent. At the same time, the mine ecological environment monitoring work plan is formulated; the construction of ecological restoration is proposed for areas (mine parks, geological parks, forest parks, and ecological parks). Through organisational structure adjustment and overall supply chain optimisation, relevant feasible solutions are proposed, and examples are given to illustrate the optimisation effects; the part summarises the significance of this research and the main existing problems and proposes future research recommendations. In the context of the new ecological environment, analysing the current situation of the ecological environment in the Central Plains, identifying the ecological and environmental problems in the process of the ecological environment, and proposing corresponding solutions based on the problems are conducive to the development of the new ecological environment in the Central Plains.

Assessment of Ecological Environment Quality for Urban Sustainable Development Based on AHP.

Cities are gradually developed on the basis of adapting and transforming the natural environment. In a certain urban area, human activities, natural environment, and other factors and their mutual influence constitute the urban ecological environment. Therefore, the evaluation of urban ecological environment quality is of great significance to the analysis of urban development. This paper takes a city in Western China as the evaluation object, uses AHP to determine the index weight, reasonably analyzes the current situation of the urban ecological environment, and further comprehensively evaluates the quality of the urban ecological environment. The study shows that from 2013 to 2018, the comprehensive capacity of the city's ecological environment quality showed a steady upward trend, except that the natural disasters of floods and mudslides in 2014 had a certain degree of fluctuation. The comprehensive index of ecological environment quality has increased from 0.337 in 2013 to 0.412 in 2018. The overall level is still low, but the development speed is relatively stable. The urban ecological environment has been gradually improved, and society, economy, and nature have maintained a certain degree of sustainable development.

Performance assessment and comparative study on novel carbon dioxide based power cycles for the cascade engine waste heat recovery

• Two novel CO 2 based power cycles for waste heat recovery are proposed. • Thermodynamic and exergoeconomic models are established for these systems. • Comparative studies and optimizations for these thermal systems are performed. • The novel systems show the better overall performance in exhaust heat extraction. Exploiting waste heat from engine could greatly alleviate current severe energy and environmental situation. Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) based power cycle is considered as a type of competitive and promising energy utilization system for engine waste heat recovery (WHR) due to its high efficiency, compact design and environmentally friendly property. However, a large space is left for CO 2 -based power cycle to improve the thermodynamic and economic performance. To more efficiently and thoroughly utilizing engine waste heat, two novel CO 2 -based power cycles are proposed. Mathematical models are developed based on the software MATLAB to conduct quantitative thermodynamic and exergoeconomic analysis, parametric analysis, system optimization, and exergy analysis on the proposed systems and two traditional systems. The results show that the first proposed system can enhance net power output by 57.95% and 4.31% and meanwhile reduce total product unit cost by 14.96% and 20.74%, respectively, compared with two traditional systems. As well, the improvement of 61.61% and 6.73% for net power output and 4.11% and 10.62% for total product unit cost can be achieved by the second proposed system. Exergy analysis indicates that the cooler and low-temperature waste heat exchanger have the first and second highest exergy destructions for two proposed systems.