China has witnessed a drop in the speed of its economic development from 14% to 6% since 2007. The literature has attributed “the miracle of China's economic growth” over the past four decades to the ...compatibility of political incentives and fiscal incentives. However, as the central government shifts its priorities from “development is the last word” to “lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets”, can local officials' political and financial incentives still achieve incentive compatibility? Theoretically and empirically, this paper examines the impact of the compatibility of political and financial incentives on local governments' environmental governance in different stages. We find that environmental performance has consistently been an important political promotion incentive for officials, especially after 2007. We also find that officials in cities with incentive compatibility have no promotion advantages over their opponents because incentive compatibility restrained the development of the manufacturing industry, leading to a suppression of the economic growth rate. Local governments sacrifice a certain economic growth rate – in other words, local fiscal revenue – in exchange for environmental quality improvements and adopt strategic actions to cater to the central government's new performance evaluation system, which focuses mainly on environmental protection assessment through strategic behavior.
•There are dynamic roles of compatibility between political and financial incentives.•An equilibrium model can capture the change in central and local governments.•The incentive compatibility phenomenon has no promotion advantage for local officials.•Environmental performance may be achieved at the expense of the economic growth rate.
Endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are xenobiotics that mimic the interaction of natural hormones and alter synthesis, transport, or metabolic pathways. The prospect of EDCs causing adverse health ...effects in humans and wildlife has led to the development of scientific and regulatory approaches for evaluating bioactivity. This need is being addressed using high-throughput screening (HTS)
approaches and computational modeling.
In support of the Endocrine Disruptor Screening Program, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) led two worldwide consortiums to virtually screen chemicals for their potential estrogenic and androgenic activities. Here, we describe the Collaborative Modeling Project for Androgen Receptor Activity (CoMPARA) efforts, which follows the steps of the Collaborative Estrogen Receptor Activity Prediction Project (CERAPP).
The CoMPARA list of screened chemicals built on CERAPP's list of 32,464 chemicals to include additional chemicals of interest, as well as simulated ToxCast™ metabolites, totaling 55,450 chemical structures. Computational toxicology scientists from 25 international groups contributed 91 predictive models for binding, agonist, and antagonist activity predictions. Models were underpinned by a common training set of 1,746 chemicals compiled from a combined data set of 11 ToxCast™/Tox21 HTS
assays.
The resulting models were evaluated using curated literature data extracted from different sources. To overcome the limitations of single-model approaches, CoMPARA predictions were combined into consensus models that provided averaged predictive accuracy of approximately 80% for the evaluation set.
The strengths and limitations of the consensus predictions were discussed with example chemicals; then, the models were implemented into the free and open-source OPERA application to enable screening of new chemicals with a defined applicability domain and accuracy assessment. This implementation was used to screen the entire EPA DSSTox database of
chemicals, and their predicted AR activities have been made available on the EPA CompTox Chemicals dashboard and National Toxicology Program's Integrated Chemical Environment. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP5580.
In this study, the central environmental protection inspection (CEPI) policy is considered a quasi-natural experiment. Based on the data of 216 Chinese cities from 2008 to 2018, the influence of CEPI ...on green technology innovation (GTI) is empirically examined mainly using difference-in-differences (DIDs), propensity score matching DID and spatial DID methods. The results indicate that CEPI can effectively promote GTI. Regarding different types of GTI, CEPI mainly promoted utilitarian GTI. Regarding the mechanism, CEPI significantly promotes local GTI mainly through the increase of environmental protection expenditure and research and development investment. Considering the dynamic marginal effect, CEPI starts to significantly promote GTI in the second year after the policy implementation but exhibited no effects in the third year. The extended study shows that GTI effect of CEPI only occurs in small-medium cities and big cities. Furthermore, there is a certain beggar-thy-neighbor effect between inspected and uninspected cities. Finally, the spatial decomposition of CEPI effects shows that the inhibitory effect of CEPI on GTI mainly occurs in the neighboring uninspected cities, while CEPI has no evident inhibition on GTI in neighboring inspected cities.
With the implementation of a series of policies related to the energy conservation and environmental protection (ECEP) industry, green finance has become a crucial approach to provide credits for the ...ECEP industry. Using data on Chinese-listed ECEP firms from 2010 to 2019, this work quantitatively identifies the financing efficiency of these firms and its determinants. The main results show that banks are still dominant in the Chinese financial market for providing credits, and firms listed on the second board show higher financing efficiency. The financing efficiency of firms located in the central and western regions improves significantly, especially after 2016, reflecting the interaction effect of green finance policies and economic policies supporting underdeveloped regions. Both country-level factors (e.g., formal institutions and financial supervision) and firm-level factors (e.g., firm size and debt ratio) have an impact on financing efficiency. These findings have important implications for policymakers who are carefully contemplating green finance policies to support ECEP firms through an effective financial market mechanism, which eventually helps to realize the transition of the energy sector.
•This paper examines the financing efficiency of Chinese ECEP firms.•Financing efficiency of firms in Western and Central regions has been improved.•Banks are overall a better provider of green finance.•The policies issued supporting ECEP firms in 2013 and 2019 are more effective.
Background Since its first record in urban areas of Central-Africa in the 2000s, the invasive mosquito, Aedes albopictus, has spread throughout the region, including in remote villages in forested ...areas, causing outbreaks of Aedes-borne diseases, such as dengue and chikungunya. Such invasion might enhance Ae. albopictus interactions with wild animals in forest ecosystems and favor the spillover of zoonotic arboviruses to humans. The aim of this study was to monitor Ae. albopictus spread in the wildlife reserve of La Lopé National Park (Gabon), and evaluate the magnitude of the rainforest ecosystem colonization. Methodology From 2014 to 2018, we used ovitraps, larval surveys, BG-Sentinel traps, and human landing catches along an anthropization gradient from La Lopé village to the natural forest in the Park. Conclusions We detected Ae. albopictus in gallery forest up to 15 km away from La Lopé village. However, Ae. albopictus was significantly more abundant at anthropogenic sites than in less anthropized areas. The number of eggs laid by Ae. albopictus decreased progressively with the distance from the forest fringe up to 200m inside the forest. Our results suggested that in forest ecosystems, high Ae. albopictus density is mainly observed at interfaces between anthropized and natural forested environments. Additionally, our data suggested that Ae. albopictus may act as a bridge vector of zoonotic pathogens between wild and anthropogenic compartments.
Access to a wide range of plastic materials has been rationalized by the increased demand from growing populations and the development of high-throughput production systems. Plastic materials at low ...costs with reliable properties have been utilized in many everyday products. Multibillion-dollar companies are established around these plastic materials, and each polymer takes years to optimize, secure intellectual property, comply with the regulatory bodies such as the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals and the Environmental Protection Agency and develop consumer confidence. Therefore, developing a fully sustainable new plastic material with even a slightly different chemical structure is a costly and long process. Hence, the production of the common plastic materials with exactly the same chemical structures that does not require any new registration processes better reflects the reality of how to address the critical future of sustainable plastics. In this review, we have highlighted the very recent examples on the synthesis of common monomers using chemicals from sustainable feedstocks that can be used as a like-for-like substitute to prepare conventional petrochemical-free thermoplastics.
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