Shuai Zhong

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Chinese Academy of Sciences

Geological hazards impede regional economy sustainability. To limit their destructive impacts on human life and property, the Chinese government has independently developed automated monitoring and early-warning equipment, which has been deployed in over 250,000 locations nationwide, yielding effective early warnings. The smooth operation of this e...

The escalating anthropogenic pressure in terrestrial borderlands is one of the major threats to transboundary ecosystems. To realize effective transboundary conservation efforts, neighboring countries need to clarify the spatial patterns and variation trends of anthropogenic pressure, as well as effects of the transboundary protected area (TBPA) on...

Access to energy, water, and food is essential to ensure sustainable development, but yet, a large number of rural Africans, lack access electricity, and many live in extreme poverty making it hard for them to have their basic needs, particularly those related to food, energy, and water. Thus, there is a need for a holistic approach that considers...

Relying on traditional biomass for cooking has become less common in many regions worldwide, however, most of the Sub-Sahara African population lacks access to clean cooking and still uses charcoal and firewood for cooking. Thus, seeking sustainable development in Sub-Sahara Africa regions would be hindered due to the consequences connected with re...

In the context of a circular economy, efficient resource utilization is crucial for promoting sustainable development. This study employs a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to explore the economic and carbon emission reduction benefits of substituting petrochemical plastics with compostable plastics in Yunnan Province. Quantitative analys...

The East African Community (EAC) region is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, which pose significant challenges to water, energy, food, and environment systems. To address these challenges and promote sustainable development, it is essential to adopt an integrated approach that considers the complex interactions and trade-offs with...

Droughts have been implicated as the main driver behind recent vegetation die‐off and are projected to drive greater mortality under future climate change. Understanding the coupling relationship between vegetation and drought has been of great global interest. Currently, the coupling relationship between vegetation and drought is mainly evaluated...

It is a common responsibility of all countries to protect the ecological environment and promote sustainable development. Eco-geology, which provides a basic guarantee for the rational utilization of natural resources, ecological protection and restoration, has gradually become a new hot spot of geological survey institutions in various countries....

In Burundi, a significant portion of the population heavily relies on agriculture for both sustenance and income. However, persistently low agricultural yields place approximately 1.8 million people at immediate risk of food insecurity. The purpose of this study was to explore the potential of the water–energy–food (WEF) nexus approach to strengthe...

In African countries, limited knowledge about the co-production of water, energy, and food (WEF) resources and their sectoral interaction makes it problematic to define sufficient policy options to ensure their efficient and sustainable production. This study proposes a new approach to assess the WEF sectors' co-production in 47 African countries f...

Country-level resource and environmental carrying capacity (RECC) assessments can reveal which countries are off-track on ongoing adaptive management towards the sustainability goals. However, fewer effective methods exist to conduct a comprehensive assessment of RECC at the country-level. We implemented the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to comp...

The study of natural resources and ecosystem service value assessments is crucial for understanding the direct economic benefits and potential ecological, environmental, and social benefits of these resources. Existing research lacks a comprehensive information management framework design and application exploration for the practice process, and a...

Energy storage technology as a key support technology for China’s new energy development, the demand for critical metal minerals such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel is growing rapidly. However, these minerals have high external dependence and concentrated import sources, increasing the supply risk caused by geopolitics. It is necessary to evaluate...

Natural capital is a constraint on sustainable development goals. There are multiple methods available for natural capital accounting, many of which are inconsistent with each other in accounting items. Another common defect is an inability to represent both physical and monetary quantities. To address these issues, we integrated the ecological foo...

Water yield as an important ecosystem service for mitigating water scarcity in drylands, is quite sensitive to land use and climate change. Evaluating the response of water yield to land use policies in drylands under climate change is conducive to sustainable water resource management. Taking the Hohhot-Baotou-Ordous-Yulin region in the northwest...

Climate change and energy transformation has been making huge alteration in power system, which led to great uncertainty in relation to material, energy and carbon emissions in power generation infrastructure. We aim to estimate material stock consumption and carbon emissions of power generation infrastructure and explores material-energy-carbon em...

Optimizing the allocation schemes of post-disaster recovery resources can promote the sustainable development of a regional economy. However, previous studies determined the inputs and allocation schemes of recovery resources based on direct economic (DE) loss while neglecting indirect economic (IDE) loss, which restricted economic recovery. This s...

Although many African countries have made significant progress towards universal access to water, energy, and food resources (WEF), assessing the ecological response to the increasing productivity of these resources is not well researched, which carries the risk of ecological deficit, resource degradation, and inefficient policy responses to resour...

Assessing cultivated land resource assets is a prerequisite for resource management and cultivated land protection. Existing methods on the physical quantity usually ignore the change in cultivated land quality and on the value quantity lack a unified standard framework. In this study, the calorific value was introduced to calculate the physical qu...

The low-carbon transition of the power system is essential for China to achieve peak carbon and carbon neutrality. However, China could suffer power shortages due to radical policies in some extreme cases. The gap between power demand and supply from March 2021 to November 2021 ranged between 5.2 billion kW·h and 24.6 billion kW·h. The main reason...

With the process of poverty eradication and economic growth, hydropower development becomes increasingly important because of its huge potential advantages in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin. However, the complex topography and rich resource endowments in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin bring a variety of potential risks and uncertainties in hydropow...

Coal-fired heating is the main method of heating in China, causing serious air pollution and large amounts of CO2 emissions. Decarbonizing heating is important to reduce carbon emissions, and choosing a suitable heating technical scheme is conducive to the early realization of carbon neutrality in China. Coal to gas and coal to electricity transfor...

China has recently put forth an ambitious plan to achieve carbon peak around 2030 and carbon neutrality around 2060. However, there are quite a few differences regarding the public views about China’s carbon policy between the Chinese people and the people from other countries, especially concerning the doubt of foreign people about the fidelity of...

Decoupling energy, water, and food (EWF) consumption and production from GHG emissions could be an important strategy for achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), and SDG 7 (Clean and Affordable Energy) in Africa. This study applies Tapio’s decoupling method to analyz...

Land carrying capacity is an important indicator to quantitatively assess and judge the extents of sustainable economic developing and coexistent harmonizing between human and nature. The significance of land carrying capacity has been highlighted recently by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which set clear requiremen...

With rapid urbanization and the requirements for new buildings and infrastructure, cement production is expected to increase in China. Meanwhile, China’s energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with cement industry are expected to increase, as cement production is one of the most energy intensive industries. Introducing new and more pert...

Energy-rich areas often rely on energy resources for economic growth, but ignore structural transformation for sustainable development. Over recent years, the coal market has been depressed, leading to a decrease in economic growth along with a difficult structural transition in the contiguous area of Shanxi and Shaanxi Provinces, and Inner Mongoli...

Energy-rich cities tend to rely on resource-based industries for economic growth, which leads to a great challenge for its low-carbon and sustainable economic development. The contiguous area of Shanxi and Shaanxi Provinces, and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (SSIM) is one of the most important national energy bases in China. Its development...

In an attempt to alleviate water scarcity, the government of China has introduced a water plan for the year 2030. Based on a dynamic computable general equilibrium model, this paper investigates how conservation of irrigation water, grain production, and the welfare of rural households will be affected by planned reductions to the irrigation water...

Coastal cities have been experiencing tremendous land use changes worldwide. Studies on the consequences of land use change in coastal cities have provided helpful information for spatial regulations and have attracted increased attention. Changes in forests and water bodies, however, have rarely been investigated, challenging the formation of a ho...

Integrated Assessment Models based on Computable General Equilibrium (IAM/CGE) and dynamic Material Flow Analysis (dynamic MFA) are two most widely used prospective model families to assess large-scale and long-term socioeconomic metabolism (SEM) and inform sustainable SEM transition. The latter approach could complement the former by a more explic...

Synergistic effects between water and energy policies are still not fully considered in Shaanxi province of China. To address the challenges of water scarcity and growing energy demand, the water–energy nexus of Shaanxi is investigated in this paper by input–output analysis (IOA). The findings indicate that water and energy resources are interdepen...

This study investigates the regional economic structure of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region with focus on the impacts of water resources on the regional economic development. The multiplier model is used to analyze the effects of the regional water sector on the other accounts. The results show that 1) the regional water sector has limited effects on t...

The stock-driven dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) model is one of the prevalent tools to investigate the evolution and related material metabolism of the building stock. There exists substantial uncertainty inherent to input parameters of the stock-driven dynamic building stock MFA model, which has not been comprehensively evaluated yet. In thi...

Water pricing policy is believed to be an efficient method for addressing the water scarcity problem in China. The motivation of this study is to provide a better understanding of how reducing irrigation subsidies impacts farming sectors and rural households. We apply a Computable General Equilibrium model to simulate the irrigation water and irrig...

Water shortage and water pollution are important factors restricting sustainable social and economic development. As a typical coal resource-exhausted city and a node city of the South-to-North Water Transfer East Route Project in China, Zaozhuang City’s water resources management faces multiple constraints such as transformation of economic develo...

This paper makes a comparative evaluation of two water management systems in China; i) a water parallel pricing system (WPP) and; ii) a water pricing system that are further separated into a system under current reform (WP_A) and a system under further reform (WP_B). This evaluation aims to identify a superior system for rural households and agricu...

To devise low-carbon cement clinker product, in-depth knowledge about the variation mechanism of cement clinker CO2 emissions is the prerequisite. The determinants of cement clinker CO2 emissions in Chinese cement industry have been inquired by several researches recently. However, the impacts and abatement effect of clinker quality on cement clink...

There have been many droughts in China that have caused severe losses. Previous studies evaluating droughts were from meteorological and hydrological perspectives. We measure the Chinese drought of 2000 based on a static computable general equilibrium model of China's macroeconomy, which describes the relationships between drought, agricultural pro...

China is one of the top 13 countries in the world in terms of water scarcity. Given continuing trends in population and economic growth, the pressures on the country’s water resources are bound to increase. The importance of water resources management has been recognized, and so water management is considered as a policy priority in action plans of...

This paper simulates urbanization under two different water management systems: i) the water parallel pricing system and ii) the water pricing system. The purpose is to discover which water management system is better for agricultural production and household welfare. The main conclusion is that the water pricing system is better than the water par...

The reform of water management in China is still in progress, and the pricing of water resources is undertaken in parallel, with a divide between irrigation water and pipe water associated with different users: The supply of irrigation water is regulated by local government and that of pipe water is operated by the production sector of pipe water....

Based on a general equilibrium modeling for macro economy considering 27 regional rural households in China, this study estimated the impacts on agricultural economy in two single cases of economic growth including industrialization and urbanization. We aimed to compare the results obtained from three different scenarios: water pricing, water unifi...

Based on a general equilibrium modeling for macro economy considering 27 regional rural households in China, this study estimated the impacts on agricultural economy in two single cases of economic growth including industrialization and urbanization. We aimed to compare the results obtained from three different scenarios: water pricing, water unifi...

Based on a standard general equilibrium model for China’s macro economy with multi-regional sectors, including water, croplands, agricultural labor and rural households, this study estimated the impact on the agricultural economy and food production from natural hazards in 2007 and considered two simulations: i) the drought-exempt case, which suppo...

By applying a structure path analysis to a two-region social accounting matrix, this study indicated that a rise in the water supply in Shanghai would allow many non-water sectors both in Shanghai and other regions to significantly improve. By testing five hypotheses, the results further illustrated that a direct effect significantly contributed mo...

This study constructs a Computable General Equilibrium model with Energy module (CGE-Energy) of China to analyze to the impact on agricultural economy as well as multi-regional rural household caused by three different situations with the limitation of water supply: i) land increasing, said baseline scenario; ii) drought scenario; iii) flood scenar...