Lei Zhang

Renmin University of China | RUC · School of Environment & Natural Resources

China’s sustainable development goals and carbon neutrality targets cannot be achieved without revolutionary transitions of the agricultural sector. The rapid development of digital technologies is believed to play a huge role in this revolution. The ongoing prevention and control of COVID-19 has greatly boosted the penetration of digital technolog...

Since its launch in 2013, the Chinese Road and Belt Innitiative (BRI) has grown into a platform for any countries and regions that wish to participate, with global connectivity as the orienting goal. However, since its inception, concerns over the BRI’s potential impacts on ecology, environment and resilience, as well as its implications for global...

Technology is an instrument to build BRI relationships, mitigate the environmental and climate impacts of BRI projects, as well as to enhance environmental sustainability in the regions. This study aims to reposition China in global climate technology transfer in BRI era and to obtain initial knowledge on needs, priorities, and barriers from the re...

Generating new knowledge and inspiring future studies are part of the value of a review. While acknowledging the contribution of the bibliometric analysis published in this journal by Qin et al. to understanding the development of environmental and resource sociology in USA, this commentary discussed the relevance of its claims and the bibliometric...

COVID-19 constitutes a high-consequence global event capable of overwhelming national public health systems and exceeding international harm mitigation capacity. The pandemic represents biological risk at an unprecedented scale and has disrupted the global economy, threatening national security, and may potentially damage the long-term progress of...

The evolution of Chinese environmental policy and politics can be better understood in the broader context of institutional changes that have taken place since the late 1970s. In this study, an analytical framework was established to analyze how overall institutional changes were reflected in the roles of relationships between governmental and non-...

Although poor air quality has been a fact of life for millions of Chinese citizens for at least two decades, individual actions to alleviate the impact of air pollution are a more recent phenomenon. Anecdotal evidence suggests that individualized responses to environmental risks and threats, which Andrew Szasz (2007) termed “inverted quarantine,” a...

Consuming safe and sustainable food requires trust. Consumer trust in food can be established in different ways, including through personal relationships or various institutional arrangements established by government, private companies and/or civil-society organisations. The recent increase in food-safety incidents and sustainability concerns in C...

China’s Environmental Protection Law (EPL) is the main national environmental legislative framework. Yet the environmental legal system is incomplete, and implementation and enforcement of environmental laws have shown major shortcomings. A controversial attempt to revise the EPL could have far-reaching impacts on China’s economic development and e...

China, as a ‘double risk’ society, is in urgent need for effective environmental risk management systems. Compared with other risks, man-made environmental risks have not been given due weight. Public awareness and perceptions of environmental risks are crucial in all phases of effective risk management. However, little is known about public percep...

The National Economic and Social Development Plans (NESDPs) of cities in China, given their comprehensive, integrated and strategic nature, have significant and profound impacts on the development of cities and their embedded ecological environments. Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEAs) on city NESDPs have the potential to improve environment...

China's 2007 Open Government Information Regulations is widely considered as a milestone in the country's information policy history and is praised as a "sunshine program". The Environmental Information Disclosure Decree was the first to operationalize these general regulations into a sectoral information disclosure system on environment. This stud...

This volume explores sports mega-events, their social, political, and cultural characters, the value systems that they inscribe and draw on, the claims they make on us and the claims the organisers make for them, the spatial and ethical relationships they create, and the responses of civil societies to them. Our premise is that sports mega-events a...

Land use changes induced by the Conversion of Cropland to Forest and Grassland Program are found to provide farm households sampled in four counties from Shaanxi and Qinghai Provinces with increased net profits. This result is found to be robust for a range of discount rates and output price projections. The net present value of the difference in f...

China's state-dominated system of industrial pollution control has fallen short in mitigating the environmental impacts of rapid industrialisation. This article adopts a multi-actor governance framework to examine and understand the answers China is seeking for these failures, via establishing a new industrial environmental governance model. In thi...

Trust and property rights are generally considered to influence farmers' behavior regarding resource use and environmental management. Previous studies show that higher trust levels may enhance contributions to public goods. This paper investigates how trust and (land) property rights security influence the provision of one concrete public good: la...