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Intravascular brachytherapy requires advances in radio-embolization technologies that combine brilliant radiostability efficacy with a facile and green synthesis route. We report a hybrid-integrated radioactive microsphere strategy using phosphorylcholine-modified lutetium-177 coordinated polymeric microspheres (177Lu-PCMs) that were fabricated via radiation-induced graft polymerization for imaging-guided locoregional intravascular brachytherapy. The underlying formation mechanism of 177Lu-PCMs is elucidated using first-principles computations and density functional theory calculations and 177Lu loading mechanisms was investigated with Near-edge and extended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy. The engineered 177Lu-PCMs exhibit excellent mechanical properties, good hydrophilicity, and controlled sphere diameter. These features provide advantages of ultra-stable and ultra-selective embolic radio-theranostics, which is demonstrated in different preclinical rodent models and isolated human liver tumor tissues. During locoregional intra-arterial brachytherapy, 177Lu-PCMs can be visualized via SPECT to validate the in vivo biodistribution and retention in real time, achieving precise delivery, effective anti-cancer treatment, and a distinguished safety profile without degradation, ectopic embolization, and adverse reactions. Therefore, this study may offer a new avenue for the development of a highly innovative and translational approach for precision intravascular brachytherapy.

Evidence on the effects of ozone on chronic lower respiratory disease (CLRD), acute respiratory infections (ARI) is still not conclusive. This study aimed to investigate the association between them in Hohhot China. Daily death counts, concentrations of PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NO2, and O3, and meteorological data were collected for Hohhot city from January 1, 2018, to December 31, 2019. We performed a time series analysis using generalized additive model (GAM). In single pollutant model, the estimated excess relative risks (EERs) for respiratory and CLRD mortality were 2.815% (95% CI: 0.075–5.630) at lag 04 and 4.409% (95% CI: 1.577–7.320) at lag 01, respectively, for each 10 µg/m3 increase in O3. No significant association was found for ARI and the other respiratory diseases mortality. Subgroup analysis showed that the respiratory diseases for men were more susceptible to O3 than women, while men had a lower association with CLRD than women. Concentrations of O3 were significantly associated with respiratory disease and CLRD for older adults. The significant positive association between O3 and respiratory mortality and CLRD mortality remained largely unchanged in the two-pollutant model and the multi-pollutant model. In conclusion, short-term exposure to O3 is significantly associated respiratory diseases and CLRD mortality, and this association is dominated by gender and age.

Conventional polymeric adsorbents encapsulate most of their ligand groups (such as amidoxime, AO) in dense structures, leading to problems such as low adsorption capacity for uranium extraction from seawater (UES). The uranium coordination environment of polymeric adsorbents has not been positively identified even after decades of research. Therefore, a new and functional biaxially stretched polyethylene (BSPE) membrane with poly-amidoxime (PAO) nanoparticles, mesoporous architecture, and nano-channels (PAO-BSPE) was fabricated in this study for UES, based on the interfacial self-assembly of axial grafting chains. The underlying mechanism involved in the formation of the PAO-BSPE membrane was elucidated using first-principles computations of the various reactions. The engineered PAO-BSPE membrane exhibited excellent hydrophilicity, good mechanical properties, high specific surface area, and contained mesoporous architecture and nano-channels, which facilitated advantages in terms of kinetics, capacity, and renewability in both laboratory experiments and marine field-testing. After 64 days of adsorption in natural seawater, the PAO-BSPE membrane with a low degree of grafting of 70.5% exhibited a high uranium-adsorption-capacity of 12.67 mg-U/g-ads, which was 1.77 times higher than that toward vanadium. The PAO-BSPE membrane efficiently extracted uranium in the presence of high concentrations of co-existing ions, with the distribution coefficient reaching 4.09 × 106 mL/g in natural seawater. The total amount of uranium recovered by the PAO-BSPE membrane was 15.0 g in terms of yellow cake during a total submersion time of 30 days in the ocean. The adsorbent exhibited a long service life of at least 12 cycles. Furthermore, near-edge and extended X-ray absorption fine structure spectroscopy analyses suggested that the mechanism of uranium adsorption involved the formation of a stable complex via the linkage of uranium with two amidoximes in a cooperative chelating fashion. This study presents a new adsorbent with improved efficiency for UES, which has significant implications for the development of polymer adsorbents with high selectivity.

Rice, China's most important food crop, is highly dependent on irrigation, but an increasing number of extreme drought events have challenged rice production in many regions. This paper investigates the role of local irrigation infrastructure in improving farmers' ability to respond to drought and its effectiveness in mitigating the drought risk in rice production in China. The analysis relies on a moment-based specification of the stochastic production function, capturing mean, variance and skewness effects. Using household survey data from 86 villages in five provinces, we jointly estimate farmers' adaptive irrigation decisions and their effects on rice yield and production risk. Our econometric analyses show that irrigation infrastructure in villages contributes to enhancing farmers' irrigation capacity in adapting to drought, and increased irrigation leads to a significant increase in mean yield and a reduction in exposure to risk as well as downside risk in rice production. The paper concludes with policy implications.

To combat pollution, the Chinese government has taken a series of environmental regulations, including requiring cities to report their daily air quality information. This has affected not only the environmental performance of governments and enterprises but also individual happiness. This paper attempts to explore whether and how mandatory air quality information disclosure affects happiness in China, using a difference-in-differences (DID) approach across cities for the waves 2007, 2008 and 2013. Empirical results show that in Chinese cities, people feel less happy over time although there is an increase in GDP per capita. Moreover, it is found that mandatory air pollution index (API) disclosure exerts a significantly positive impact on happiness, mainly by reducing air pollution. Our analysis has policy implications that for developing countries, air quality information disclosure should be encouraged since it is effective in combating air pollution resulting from high economic development and meanwhile it adds to individual happiness.

Although the importance of forests in climate change mitigation has been widely recognized, there has been a lack of empirical research regarding the role of forests in agricultural adaptation to climate change. This paper uses a careful designed household survey in South China that considers an exogenous shock of drought, to determine whether the presence of natural and planted forests near rice-producing villages can reduce the adverse effects of drought on rice yield. After controlling for local climate and water infrastructure, we find robust evidence that natural forests and not planted forests have significant positive effects on rice yield, due to their influence on the availability of water for irrigation. Although drought hinders farmers access to irrigation, which negatively affects rice yield, forests near villages provide protection for rice against drought. These findings support the adoption of forest ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) to cope with climate change and enhance food security. Acknowledgement

In this chapter Jikun Huang and Yangjie Wang provide an overview and case studies of the connection between agriculture, foreign aid and climate change, and argue the extent to which agriculture is heavily underfunded and that foreign aid needs to be scaled up significantly to tackle the great challenge of food security in a climate change context. They also point at how to make climate finance through foreign aid more effective to tackle mitigation and adaptation in agriculture across different types of mitigation and adaptation measures.

Whether the emission trading scheme (ETS) can achieve energy conservation and emission reduction in developing countries is crucial for these countries to achieve sustainable economic and environmental development. This study investigates the energy conservation and emission reduction effects of China's carbon dioxide (CO2) ETS pilot policy implemented in 2011. Based on panel data of the two-digit industry at province level from 2005 to 2015, we adopt the difference-in-differences (DID) model to examine the effects of the CO2 ETS on energy conservation and emission reduction. The results show that the CO2 ETS decreases the energy consumption of the regulated industries in pilot areas by 22.8% and the CO2 emissions by 15.5% compared to those in nonpilot areas. Further analysis indicates that the policy effects are mainly driven by improving technical efficiency and adjusting industrial structure. In addition, we find that the CO2 ETS performs better in areas with high levels of environmental enforcement and marketization. Overall, our findings suggest that the CO2 ETS has achieved energy conservation and emission reduction effects in developing countries.

We use “China's sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions trading program” as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the causal effect of this market-based environmental regulation on firm's labor demand. Based on the difference-in-differences (DID) method and a series of robustness tests, we observe robust evidence that the emissions trading program significantly increases the labor demand of regulated firms, and that this positive employment effect is driven by the expansion of firm's production scale. The observable evidence leads us to cautiously conclude that the market-based environmental regulations in even developing countries could achieve the double dividend of coexistence of environmental protection and employment growth.

Maternal mortality in China decreased 59 percent during 2000–2014, while clean energy consumption nearly doubled. This paper examines how the widespread adoption of natural gas as a source of clean energy improves the health of pregnant women, an environment-sensitive group often ignored in previous pollution studies. Using variation across provinces and over time in the density of natural gas infrastructure in China, we identify a significant and negative clean energy adoption – maternal mortality relationship in China. Specifically, we find that a one-unit increase in natural gas density – measured by the length of natural gas pipelines per 10,000 persons – would cause the maternal mortality rate to decrease by 4 percent, which would translate into an annual gain of approximately 648 pregnant women’s lives. We also present several additional specification checks and find that the results are insensitive to these considerations. This finding suggests that natural gas adoption has substantial health externalities and should be an important part of policy discussions surrounding clean energy production. To our knowledge, this is the first study to draw a causal link between clean energy use and maternal mortality.