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Urban agriculture (UA), the growing of fruits and vegetables in urban and peri-urban areas, may improve food security and access, public health and dietary quality on both a broad and personal scale. However, there is little research on the relationship between UA and diet, and potential mediating factors are also unclear. This study aimed to investigate if proximity to and engagement with UA is associated with better diet quality, and what accounts for this relationship. UK-based adults (N = 583, 69% Female) completed measures of proximity to and engagement with UA, perceived access to fruits and vegetables, health and ethical food choice motivations, connection with nature, psychological distress and dietary quality in an online survey. Participants were recruited from UA-related groups and the general public. Proposed relationships were analysed using a structural equation model. Greater proximity to and engagement with UA was associated with greater perceived access to fruits and vegetables, more health-related food choice motivations, more ethical-related food choice, feeling more connected with nature, and, surprisingly greater psychological distress. Furthermore, proximity to and engagement with UA was indirectly associated with better diet quality via health-, and ethical-related, food choice motivations. While the direct pathway between proximity to and engagement with UA and diet quality was not significant, UA is associated with better diet quality, partly via healthier and ethical food choice motivations. Upscaling UA may have benefits for dietary quality via these factors, and more research is needed to test causal relationships and understand these complex interactions., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Over the past few decades, the pollutant emissions trading policies in China have undergone significant innovation and exploration. It is considered as a market-based approach that became integrated with command-and-control mechanisms such as total emissions control or pollution permits. This study is the first to provide systematic, reflective thinking that tracks the regional initiatives of pollutant emissions trading systems in China. In this article, we divided China's emissions trading practices into three stages and conducted a comparative qualitative analysis of the country's eleven provincial emissions trading pilots. We found that provincial pilots are highly diverse and complex regarding the pollutants that can be traded, the industrial sectors involved, the design of trading administration and processes, and the implementation of trading practices such as allowance, pricing and platforms. We also identified four main challenges: legislation setup, monitoring and verification, administrative interference, and the technical quantification of pollutant hotspots. We conclude the article by providing policy implications so that emissions trading policies can be integrated with the newly developed pollution permitting system., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Nitrogen oxides (NO x ) has become the priority of China's air pollution control, but the regional socio-economic factors responsible for NO x generation are embedded with spatial disparities, which leads to different effects of air quality policy at the local level. This study applied a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model to investigate the drivers of NO x generation from energy consumption (NGEC) in China's 30 provinces, to explore nonstationary spatial effects of NGEC. The results showed that population size has always been the dominant factor in spatial NGEC across all regions of China, although there is a minor north-south difference. However, the effect of per capita GDP and energy intensity leads to a significant north-south difference when they are influencing NGEC, which shows a minor west-east difference from thermal power generation (TE). We also found that in Northern and Northeast China, the transition towards cleaner energy structure based on natural gas has started correlating significantly with NO x generation through a weakly negative effect in 2015. Our findings show alternative strategies on NO x reduction, which include the spatially differentiated effect of regional socioeconomic factors on energy consumption., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Suppliers' adoption of sustainable practices plays a critical role for global companies to improve environmental performance. Based on the absorptive capacity theory, this study empirically explores how suppliers' knowledge bases and power relationships influence their adoption of sustainability practices. A longitudinal case study with eight suppliers has been conducted. We find that the adoption of leading sustainable practices requires a supplier's good knowledge base whereas a supplier can adopt imitating and toddling sustainable practices even if it has a limited knowledge base. Both the power of internal sustainability teams and external buyers enhance the effects of suppliers' knowledge bases on the adoption of sustainable practices. Suppliers choose the strategy used in adopting sustainable practices according to the configuration of internal and external power. The results enhance the current understandings of the mechanisms through which knowledge bases and power relationships affect the adoption of sustainable practices. The findings can also help global companies improve the effectiveness of their supplier development efforts and enhance the environmental performance of supply chains., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

In the West, limited government capacity to solve environmental problems has triggered the rise of a variety of "nonstate actors" to supplement government efforts or provide alternative mechanisms for addressing environmental issues. How does this development - along with our efforts to understand it - map onto environmental governance processes in China? China's efforts to address environmental issues reflect institutionalized governance processes that differ from parallel western processes in ways that have major consequences for domestic environmental governance practices and the governance of China "going abroad." China's governance processes blur the distinction between the state and other actors; the "shadow of the state" is a major factor in all efforts to address environmental issues. The space occupied by nonstate actors in western systems is occupied by shiye danwei ("public service units"), she hui tuanti ("social associations") and e-platforms, all of which have close links to the state. Meanwhile, international NGOs and multinational corporations are also significant players in China. As a result, the mechanisms of influence that produce effects in China differ in important ways from mechanisms familiar from the western experience. This conclusion has far-reaching implications for those seeking to address global environmental concerns, given the importance of China's growing economy and burgeoning network of trade relationships., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)