Sustainability

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1189 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Sustainable Civil-Society Engagement: Potentials of a Transnational Civil Society in French-German, Polish-German, and Czech-German Border Regions

by Klaus Boehnke, Susanne Rippl and Daniel Fuss

Sustainability 2015, 7(4), 4078-4099; https://doi.org/10.3390/su7044078 - 8 Apr 2015

Cited by 15 | Viewed by 7080

Abstract

Based on representative survey data, the present study examines potentials for the sustainable development of a transnational civil society in French-German, Polish-German, and Czech-German border regions. The theoretical framework is a social capital approach in the tradition of Putnam. Transnational engagement is seen [...] Read more.

Based on representative survey data, the present study examines potentials for the sustainable development of a transnational civil society in French-German, Polish-German, and Czech-German border regions. The theoretical framework is a social capital approach in the tradition of Putnam. Transnational engagement is seen as a key element for the development of a border-crossing civil society. For the analysis, existing forms of social capital were classified according to their bridging and bonding functions and the potentials of local and transnational activities are described. Furthermore, using multilevel analysis, the predictive power of different variables like individual dispositions and specific contexts of the regions on cross-border activities are examined. Descriptively, the expected lower level of local civil-society engagement, in general, and also with regard to the transnational activities was found for post-socialist border regions. It is shown that, first and foremost, existing experience in civil-society engagement in the local context is a high-impact predictor for both transnational activities and an interest in such activities. Other variables like feelings of a historical burden or the economic situation of the region are less important. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Borderland Studies and Sustainability)

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19863 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Assessing Heat Health Risk for Sustainability in Beijing’s Urban Heat Island

by Weihua Dong, Zhao Liu, Lijie Zhang, Qiuhong Tang, Hua Liao and Xian'en Li

Sustainability 2014, 6(10), 7334-7357; https://doi.org/10.3390/su6107334 - 23 Oct 2014

Cited by 91 | Viewed by 15028

Abstract

This research is motivated by the increasing threat of urban heat waves that are likely worsened by pervasive global warming and urbanization. Different regions of the city including urban, borderland and rural area will experience different levels of heat health risk. In this [...] Read more.

This research is motivated by the increasing threat of urban heat waves that are likely worsened by pervasive global warming and urbanization. Different regions of the city including urban, borderland and rural area will experience different levels of heat health risk. In this paper, we propose an improved approach to quantitatively assess Beijing’s heat health risk based on three factors from hazard, vulnerability and especially environment which is considered as an independent factor because different land use/cover types have different influence on ambient air temperatures under the Urban Heat Island effect. The results show that the heat health risk of Beijing demonstrates a spatial-temporal pattern with higher risk in the urban area, lower risk in the borderland between urban and rural area, and lowest risk in the rural area, and the total risk fluctuated dramatically during 2008–2011. To be more specific, the heat health risk was clearly higher in 2009 and 2010 than in 2008 and 2011. Further analysis with the urban area at sub-district level signifies that the impervious surface (urban area such as buildings, roads, et al.) ratio is of high correlation with the heat health risk. The validation results show that the proposed method improved the accuracy of heat health risk assessment. We recommend that policy makers should develop efficient urban planning to accomplish Beijing’s sustainable development. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Borderland Studies and Sustainability)

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3825 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Spatio-Temporal Distribution and Development Modes of Border Ports in China

by Jiaoe Wang, Yang Cheng and Huihui Mo

Sustainability 2014, 6(10), 7089-7106; https://doi.org/10.3390/su6107089 - 16 Oct 2014

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 9843

Abstract

Border ports play a substantial role in socio-economic exchanges, which reflect the diplomatic relations between neighboring countries. This paper maps and analyzes the evolution process of border ports in China since the 1930s, in terms of the spatial distribution, transport modes, cargo and [...] Read more.

Border ports play a substantial role in socio-economic exchanges, which reflect the diplomatic relations between neighboring countries. This paper maps and analyzes the evolution process of border ports in China since the 1930s, in terms of the spatial distribution, transport modes, cargo and flows of people. Four development modes of border ports and cities are summarized based on the functions and development level of border ports and their proximity to urban core areas. The four modes include: (1) Port-Port mode; (2) City-Port-Port-City mode; (3) City (Port)-Port-City mode; (4) City (Port)-City (Port) mode, which also reflect the spatio-temporal evolution process of certain border ports and cities. The results show that the development of border ports is closely related to the bilateral relations with neighboring countries and their complementarities of natural resources and economic development, national foreign policies, as well as the physical, historical and cultural context. The findings of this study are helpful to promote the sustainable development of the border port system which is crucial for win-win reciprocity between China and its neighboring countries. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Borderland Studies and Sustainability)

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2712 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Cyberspace Knowledge Gaps and Boundaries in Sustainability Science: Topics, Regions, Editorial Teams and Journals

by Stanley D. Brunn

Sustainability 2014, 6(10), 6576-6603; https://doi.org/10.3390/su6106576 - 29 Sep 2014

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 6477

Abstract

The scholarly world of sustainability science is one that is international and interdisciplinary, but is one, on close reading of research contributions, editoral teams, journal citations, and geographic coverage, that has much unevenness. The focus of this paper is on the cyberspace boundaries [...] Read more.

The scholarly world of sustainability science is one that is international and interdisciplinary, but is one, on close reading of research contributions, editoral teams, journal citations, and geographic coverage, that has much unevenness. The focus of this paper is on the cyberspace boundaries between and within fields and disciplines studying sustainability; these boundaries separate knowledge gaps or uneven patterns in sustainability scholarship. I use the volume of hyperlinks on Google Search Engine and Google Scholar to illustrate the nature and extent of the boundaries in cyberspace that exist and also the subject and geographic gaps in the home countries of sustainability journal editors and editorial board members of 69 journals, many which have appeared since 2000. The results reveal that knowledge boundaries are part of the current nature of sustainability scholarship and that, while there is global coverage in our knowledge of sustainability, as well as sustainability maps and photographs, we know much less about sustainability in countries of the Global South than the Global North. This unevenness extends to the dominance of North America, Europe, and China as leaders in what we know. English-speaking countries also tend to dominate both journal editors and editorial board members, even though countries in the Global South have representation. The volumes of hyperlinks for the sustainability journals associated with both databases are similar with major interdisciplinary journals having the largest numbers. As the field of international sustainability science continues to evolve, it bears observing whether the cyberspace knowledge or boundary gaps will narrow in what is recognized by most science and policy scientists as one of the most important transdisciplinary fields of study in the Global South and North. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Borderland Studies and Sustainability)

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1817 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Focused Crawler for Borderlands Situation Information with Geographical Properties of Place Names

by Dongyang Hou, Hao Wu, Jun Chen and Ran Li

Sustainability 2014, 6(10), 6529-6552; https://doi.org/10.3390/su6106529 - 29 Sep 2014

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 6628

Abstract

Place name is an important ingredient of borderlands situation information and plays a significant role in collecting them from the Internet with focused crawlers. However, current focused crawlers treat place name in the same way as any other common keyword, which has no [...] Read more.

Place name is an important ingredient of borderlands situation information and plays a significant role in collecting them from the Internet with focused crawlers. However, current focused crawlers treat place name in the same way as any other common keyword, which has no geographical properties. This may reduce the effectiveness of focused crawlers. To solve the problem, this paper firstly discusses the importance of place name in focused crawlers in terms of location and spatial relation, and, then, proposes the two-tuple-based topic representation method to express place name and common keyword, respectively. Afterwards, spatial relations between place names are introduced to calculate the relevance of given topics and webpages, which can make the calculation process more accurately. On the basis of the above, a focused crawler prototype for borderlands situation information collection is designed and implemented. The crawling speed and F-Score are adopted to evaluate its efficiency and effectiveness. Experimental results indicate that the efficiency of our proposed focused crawler is consistent with the polite access interval and it could meet the daily demand of borderlands situation information collection. Additionally, the F-Score value of our proposed focused crawler increases by around 7%, which means that our proposed focused crawler is more effective than the traditional best-first focused crawler. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Borderland Studies and Sustainability)

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1443 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Information Extraction of High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Image Based on Multiresolution Segmentation

by Peng Shao, Guodong Yang, Xuefeng Niu, Xuqing Zhang, Fulei Zhan and Tianqi Tang

Sustainability 2014, 6(8), 5300-5310; https://doi.org/10.3390/su6085300 - 14 Aug 2014

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 5994

Abstract

The principle of multiresolution segmentation was represented in detail in this study, and the canny algorithm was applied for edge-detection of a remotely sensed image based on this principle. The target image was divided into regions based on object-oriented multiresolution segmentation and edge-detection. [...] Read more.

The principle of multiresolution segmentation was represented in detail in this study, and the canny algorithm was applied for edge-detection of a remotely sensed image based on this principle. The target image was divided into regions based on object-oriented multiresolution segmentation and edge-detection. Furthermore, object hierarchy was created, and a series of features (water bodies, vegetation, roads, residential areas, bare land and other information) were extracted by the spectral and geometrical features. The results indicate that the edge-detection has a positive effect on multiresolution segmentation, and overall accuracy of information extraction reaches to 94.6% by the confusion matrix. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Borderland Studies and Sustainability)

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2377 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Border Policies in Dehong Prefecture of Yunnan, China

by Qianlong Bie, Cansong Li and Shangyi Zhou

Sustainability 2014, 6(8), 5284-5299; https://doi.org/10.3390/su6085284 - 13 Aug 2014

Cited by 9 | Viewed by 6666

Abstract

With the process of globalization, many political geographers and research institutions have begun to focus on borders and border areas. Faced with the current debate on the border policies, this paper reviews the former research relating to border studies and provides an evaluation [...] Read more.

With the process of globalization, many political geographers and research institutions have begun to focus on borders and border areas. Faced with the current debate on the border policies, this paper reviews the former research relating to border studies and provides an evaluation of China’s border policies. The literatures on border effects reveal that national boundaries have a significant impact on the economic, social and cultural relations of both border regions. Because of these effects, each country has to adjust its border policies in different periods. In this paper, a perspective is provided for evaluating the effectiveness of China’s border policy based on the Kaldor-Hicks analysis method. We investigated the border policies in Dehong Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan province of China from 1949 to 2012, and evaluated the effectiveness of the border policy using the Kaldor-Hicks method. The conclusions include: first, the Kaldor-Hicks method can be seen as effective method to evaluate the effectiveness of China’s border policies. Second, based on the Kaldor-Hicks method, we observe the overall effects of the adjustments made to the border policies in Dehong Prefecture were positive. However, sometimes the border trade policy is good for the country as a whole, but not necessarily for Dehong Prefecture. For the sake of the whole country, adjustments in border trade policy need to be compensated by financial transfer payments. In addition, the combined effects of the cross-border marriages policy are not immediately obvious. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Borderland Studies and Sustainability)

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1074 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Using Web Crawler Technology for Geo-Events Analysis: A Case Study of the Huangyan Island Incident

by Hao Hu, Yuejing Ge and Dongyang Hou

Sustainability 2014, 6(4), 1896-1912; https://doi.org/10.3390/su6041896 - 9 Apr 2014

Cited by 31 | Viewed by 11108

Abstract

Social networking and network socialization provide abundant text information and social relationships into our daily lives. Making full use of these data in the big data era is of great significance for us to better understand the changing world and the information-based society. [...] Read more.

Social networking and network socialization provide abundant text information and social relationships into our daily lives. Making full use of these data in the big data era is of great significance for us to better understand the changing world and the information-based society. Though politics have been integrally involved in the hyperlinked world issues since the 1990s, the text analysis and data visualization of geo-events faced the bottleneck of traditional manual analysis. Though automatic assembly of different geospatial web and distributed geospatial information systems utilizing service chaining have been explored and built recently, the data mining and information collection are not comprehensive enough because of the sensibility, complexity, relativity, timeliness, and unexpected characteristics of political events. Based on the framework of Heritrix and the analysis of web-based text, word frequency, sentiment tendency, and dissemination path of the Huangyan Island incident were studied by using web crawler technology and the text analysis. The results indicate that tag cloud, frequency map, attitudes pie, individual mention ratios, and dissemination flow graph, based on the crawled information and data processing not only highlight the characteristics of geo-event itself, but also implicate many interesting phenomenon and deep-seated problems behind it, such as related topics, theme vocabularies, subject contents, hot countries, event bodies, opinion leaders, high-frequency vocabularies, information sources, semantic structure, propagation paths, distribution of different attitudes, and regional difference of net citizens’ response in the Huangyan Island incident. Furthermore, the text analysis of network information with the help of focused web crawler is able to express the time-space relationship of crawled information and the information characteristic of semantic network to the geo-events. Therefore, it is a useful tool to collect information for understanding the formation and diffusion of web-based public opinions in political events. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Borderland Studies and Sustainability)

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