Objective
This study examined the effects of overweight/obesity on mortality and morbidity outcomes and the disparities, time trends, and projected future obesity health burden in China.
Methods
...Cohort studies that were conducted in China and published in English or Chinese between January 1, 1995, and July 31, 2021, were systematically searched. This study focused on overweight/obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic syndrome, cancers, and chronic kidney disease.
Results
A total of 31 cohorts and 50 cohort studies reporting on mortality (n = 20) and morbidities (n = 30) associated with obesity met study inclusion criteria. Overall, BMI was nonlinearly (U‐shaped) associated with all‐cause mortality and linearly associated with risks of T2DM, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, cancer, metabolic syndrome, and chronic kidney disease. In 2018, among adults, the prevalence of overweight/obesity, hypertension, and T2DM was 51.2%, 27.5%, and 12.4%, respectively. Their future projected prevalence would be 70.5%, 35.4%, and 18.5% in 2030, respectively. The projected number of adults having these conditions would be 810.65 million, 416.47 million, and 217.64 million, respectively. The urban‐rural disparity in overweight/obesity prevalence was projected to shrink and then reverse over time.
Conclusions
The current health burden of obesity in China is high and it will sharply increase in coming years and affect population groups differently. China needs to implement vigorous interventions for obesity prevention and treatment.
•China’s dual land system restricts sustainable rural development.•Land consolidation coordinates the man-land relationship in rural China.•The transfer of land operation right for scale operation ...should be encouraged.•An expanded rural land market is needed to reverse rural hollowing problem.•Peasants' concern must be respected when implementing land consolidation.
The dual land system restricts the sustainable development of rural China which undergoes rapid depopulation and abandoned and inefficiently used land. The viewpoint paper reviews the typical rural land system and reflects the land consolidation project in a village community of Shandong Province. It indicates that land consolidation is needed to coordinate and improve the changing human-land relationship in rural China. Certain policy terms and stipulations could be set to encourage the transfer of peasant's land operation right and promote scale land operation. And, an expanded rural land market is needed to enhance the value of peasants’ residential land to reverse village hollowing problem. Finally, the paper highlights that rural land consolidation is a systematic project and should be implemented by respecting local stakeholders’ willingness and request.
This paper discusses the challenges faced by rural learners in South Africa in the context of the world pandemic commonly known as COVID-19. Rural learners face unprecedented challenges in adjusting ...to a new mode of life and learning, the latter being characterised by the predominant use of online, learning management systems and low-tech applications. The paper is informed by critical emancipatory research, I used participatory action research. A total of 10 learners and five teachers participated via Whatsapp. The paper answers two questions: what are the learning challenges faced by rural learners in South Africa, and how can online learning be enhanced in the context of COVID-19? The findings suggest that, while the South African government is promoting online learning as the only alternative in the context of COVID-19, this mode excludes many rural learners from teaching and learning, due to a lack of resources to connect to the internet, the learning management system, and low-tech software. The paper argues that rural learners are critical stakeholders in education and in the fight against COVID-19, and they cannot be left behind in efforts to fight the pandemic.
•A mathematic model is built to evaluate the air pollution of heating consumption.•The coal substitution policy can reduce the PM2.5 concentrations by about 20 μg/m3.•Effect of renewable energy and ...its development to air quality is considered.•PM2.5 concentration in 2030 will drop by about 27% in Northern China compared to 2016.
The Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan proposed in 2013 has contributed to the fossil fuel reduction in central heating, but the consumption of scattered coal in rural areas should not be overlooked as it accounts for nearly 50% pollutant emissions during the heating season. Air Pollution Prevention and Control Action Plan for Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Surrounding Areas was issued to solve the problem of scattered coal consumption and improve the heating energy structure in 2017. In this paper, an air quality-heating model is established to evaluate the air quality improvement potential and far-reaching influence of scattered coal consumption reduction in rural areas. Distinct from other air quality evaluation models, the proposed model is to evaluate the regional air quality related to the heating factors. The results indicate that the coal substitution policy can reduce PM2.5 concentrations in the heating season by about 20 μg/m3 in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and surrounding areas. Furthermore, predictions about the variation of PM2.5 concentration in the heating season are conducted, which indicate that the PM2.5 concentration of Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and surrounding areas in 2030 will drop by 48%, 35%, 29% and 23% respectively compared to that in 2016. The reduction could be further enhanced to be 55%, 40%, 32% and 27% with the consideration of clean power development. This study is conducive to evaluate the clean heating technologies role in improving the environment and air quality.
In order to quantify the energy efficiency of a wireless network, the power consumption of the entire system needs to be captured. In this article, the necessary extensions with respect to existing ...performance evaluation frameworks are discussed. The most important addenda of the proposed energy efficiency evaluation framework (E 3 F) are a sophisticated power model for various base station types, as well as large-scale long-term traffic models. The BS power model maps the RF output power radiated at the antenna elements to the total supply power of a BS site. The proposed traffic model emulates the spatial distribution of the traffic demands over large geographical regions, including urban and rural areas, as well as temporal variations between peak and off-peak hours. Finally, the E 3 F is applied to quantify the energy efficiency of the downlink of a 3GPP LTE radio access network.
BackgroundChina consumes about 40% of the world's cigarettes, predominantly by men, following a large increase in recent decades. We assess sex-specific prevalence and changing patterns of smoking in ...Chinese adults in the current decade.MethodsA nationally representative survey of smoking was conducted in 2010 among 100 000 Chinese adults aged ≥18 years, using a multistage stratified cluster sampling method. Information on smoking frequency, type, amount, age started and quitting was collected. Sex-specific standardised prevalence and means were analysed and compared with estimates in the 1996 national survey.ResultsIn Chinese men aged ≥18, 62.4% were ever-smokers in 2010, including 54.0% current smokers and 8.4% ex-smokers. The smoking prevalence was higher in rural than in urban men (63.9% vs 58.4%). In younger men, the age to start smoking was earlier and exclusive cigarette use was much higher. Among current smokers, only 17.3% intended to quit. Compared with a similar survey in 1996 among adults aged 30–69, more smokers had quit in 2010 than in 1996 (11.0% vs 4.2%), but the number of cigarettes smoked per current smoker was higher (17.9 vs 15.2). In Chinese women, only 3.4% ever smoked and there has been a large intergenerational decrease in smoking uptake rates. In 2010, there were 318 million current smokers in China, consuming an estimated 1740 billion cigarettes.ConclusionsThe prevalence of smoking remained extremely high in men, but low and falling in Chinese women. Tobacco smoking remains an important public health issue in China, and stronger and more efficient tobacco control is urgently needed.
Now, more than ever, broadband Internet access (BIA) must be recognized as a social determinant of health. Disparities in access should be treated as a public health issue because they affect "the ...health of people and communities where they live, learn, work and play." The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates that lack of BIA influences each of the six social determinant of health domains defined by the American Medical Association.2 It also affects an additional domain, which is particularly pertinent during a pandemic-access to credible information (Figure 1). Reduced BIA, particularly during this pandemic, has the potential to exacerbate this country's existing health disparities because it disproportionately affects those who are already vulnerable. Indeed, those who are older, are racial/ ethnic minorities, have lower incomes, are less educated, or live in rural areas may experience worse health outcomes under normal circumstances and are even less able to access healthenhancing resources during social-distancing orders.
The nighttime light (NTL) observations from Defense Meteorological Satellite Program/Operational Linescane System (DMSP/OLS) offer great potentials to study urban dynamics from regional to global ...scales, for more than two decades. In this paper, we presented a new approach to develop spatially and temporally consistent global urban maps from 1992 to 2013, using the DMSP/OLS NTL observations. First, potential urban clusters were delineated using the NTL data and a segmentation method. Then, a quantile-based approach was used to remove rural and suburban areas sequentially in the potential urban clusters. Finally, the derived series of urban extents in the entire study period (1992–2013) were improved for temporal consistency. We found the percentage of global urban areas relative to the world's land surface area increased from 0.23% in 1992 to 0.53% in 2013. Asia is the continent with the most significant urban growth, worldwide. The time series of global urban maps were evaluated for the spatial agreement and temporal consistency using a variety of widely used independent land-cover products. This evaluation indicates that the proposed approach is robust and performs well in deriving global urban dynamics across different spatial scales, i.e., cluster, province (or state), country, and region. Moreover, this quantile-based approach is advantageous, compared with other methods used in previous studies, because it does not require additional data for enhancement or calibration. The new time series of urban maps from this study offer a new dataset for studying global urbanization during the past decades and unique information to explore potential future trajectories of urban development, which appears to be distinct for different nations/regions, globally. Such information is pre-requisite for achieving the sustainable development goals, and associated targets, during ensuing decades.
•We proposed a new approach to map global urban dynamics from nighttime lights.•We present a global view of annual dynamics of urban extent from 1992 to 2013.•The percentage of urban land increased from around 0.2% (1992) to 0.5% (2013) at the global level.
Rural e-commerce is embraced as an opportunity for economic advancement for farmers in developing countries. However, little empirical evidence has been presented about the factors that affect ...farmers' decisions to adopt e-commerce, and how much farmers benefit from as well as cost on the adoption. This study addresses this research gap by analyzing rural household data collected in the Shandong, Henan and Shaanxi provinces of China in 2019, utilizing an endogenous switching regression (ESR) model to address the self-selection bias issue. The empirical results show that education level, smartphone use, off-farm employment and social capital significantly impact farmers' decisions to adopt e-commerce. E-commerce adoption drives a significant increase in selling price; yet simultaneously causes a tremendous increase in marketing costs for farmers. The operation of e-commerce requires farmers to pay considerable costs that were formerly undertaken by intermediaries in conventional exchange transactions. Still, farmers are seen to benefit from adopting e-commerce, as the gross return shows an increase. The PSM approach is employed for the robustness check, which obtains consistent results with the ESR model. The results of the heterogeneous analysis show that the rural households that are located closer to the local township benefit more from the adoption of e-commerce. Overall, this study presents a better understanding of the actual impacts of adopting e-commerce for farmers in rural China, which provides valuable insights for other developing countries or regions that also engage in rural e-commerce to promote the development of rural economy.
•E-commerce adoption drives significant increases in selling price.•However, e-commerce adoption brings farmers tremendous increases in marketing costs because the operation of e-commerce requires farmers to pay considerable costs that were formerly undertaken by intermediaries in the conventional exchange transactions.•Even though, farmers still benefit from adopting e-commerce to sell their products as the gross return shows an increase with the adoption of e-commerce.•The results of the heterogenous analysis show that the rural households that are located closer to the local township benefit more from the adoption of e-commerce.
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