Gang-Jun Liu

Ageing in Place: The Out-of-Home Travel Patterns of Seniors in Victoria and its Policy Implications

The decade immediately after the end of the Second World War gave rise to three key societal developments in Australia—a dramatic increase in the birth rate and car ownership, plus an acceleration of the suburbanisation process. Five decades later, these three developments would converge and give rise to a new public policy problem: a spatially dispersed ageing population. To address this problem, Australia has opted for an ‘ageing in place’ strategy. While this strategy has been embraced by many, it poses a number of serious challenges for both policymakers and seniors alike. Foremost amongst them is the issue of being able to access outside of the home those things that are deemed essential to ones well-being and quality of life. This article explores this issue through an assessment of the out-of-home travel behaviour of a sample of seniors who live in or on the outskirts of metropolitan Melbourne. It investigates why seniors in three different case study areas need to travel outside the home, how often and how far, plus what modes of transportation are used. The study establishes that if an ageing in place strategy is to continue then seniors must be able to access a wide range of services and facilities either in their immediate neighbourhood or surrounding area. Urban and regional planners will need to respond to this emerging issue as the number of seniors projected to retire and live on into their late 80s is going to triple in the coming decades.

Multi-scale integrated assessment of urban energy use and CO2 emissions

Accurate and detailed accounting of energy-induced carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is crucial to the evaluation of pressures on natural resources and the environment, as well as to the assignment of responsibility for emission reductions. However, previous emission inventories were usually production- or consumption-based accounting, and few studies have comprehensively documented the linkages among socio-economic activities and external transaction in urban areas. Therefore, we address this gap in proposing an analytical framework and accounting system with three dimensions of boundaries to comprehensively assess urban energy use and related CO2 emissions. The analytical framework depicted the input, transformation, transfer and discharge process of the carbon-based (fossil) energy flows through the complex urban ecosystems, and defined the accounting scopes and boundaries on the strength of ‘carbon footprint’ and ‘urban metabolism’. The accounting system highlighted the assessment for the transfer and discharge of socio-economic subsystems with different spatial boundaries. Three kinds methods applied to Beijing City explicitly exhibited the accounting characteristics. Our research firstly suggests that urban carbon-based energy metabolism can be used to analyze the process and structure of urban energy consumption and CO2 emissions. Secondly, three kinds of accounting methods use different benchmarks to estimate urban energy use and CO2 emissions with their distinct strength and weakness. Thirdly, the empirical analysis in Beijing City demonstrate that the three kinds of methods are complementary and give different insights to discuss urban energy-induced CO2 emissions reduction. We deduce a conclusion that carbon reductions responsibility can be assigned in the light of production, consumption and shared responsibility based principles. Overall, from perspective of the industrial and energy restructuring and the residential lifestyle changes, our results shed new light on the analysis on the evolutionary mechanism and pattern of urban energy-induced CO2 emissions with the combination of three kinds of methods. And the spatial structure adjustment and technical progress provides further elements for consideration about the scenarios of change in urban energy use and CO2 emissions.

Enhancing municipal solid waste recycling through reorganizing waste pickers: A case study in Nanjing, China:

Waste pickers (WPs) play an indispensable role by helping to control municipal solid waste (MSW). However, they constitute the entry-level workforce of the waste recycling industry and receive little attention from the general public. In China, approximately 4 million WPs make their living by collecting MSW recyclable materials. To assess the role of WPs, an extensive social survey including urban management decision-makers, recycling industrial circle insiders, WPs, as well as common citizen respondents has been conducted in the city of Nanjing, China. The results confirmed that 70–80% of recyclable MSW materials were collected by WPs in the informal sector, which are an integral component of the waste recycling system. In Nanjing, the recyclable material collected annually by WPs is about 505,000 tons, which creates annual economic value of about 78.6–84.7 million USD. However, WPs account for only 6.8–7.3% of the entire industrial chain of the recycling economy. In Nanjing, WPs are able to save an annual MSW disposal cost of about 17.6–22.0 million USD. The resource recovery rate is also increased by 1.9–8.0%. The survey results support the experience of establishing a community-based semi-official picker organizational framework, accompanied by relevant laws, regulations, and preferential policies that would improve the resource recovery rate and pickers’ living and working conditions in order to achieve more effective and hazard-free MSW resource utilization. It is anticipated that the results of this research will be instrumental for the improvement of the MSW recycling system and WP management in other cities in China and other developing countries.

Accessibility to Essential Services and Facilities by a Spatially Dispersed Aging Population in Suburban Melbourne, Australia

Advances in microelectronics and the increasing use of digital mobile technologies associated with location based service (LBS) provision and consumption, have started to profoundly change the way we make decisions about when, how and where we do things. Microelectronics based modes of communication have extended our capacity to escape the ‘spatial fix’ that has constrained our ability to access and consume services outside the home environment in the past. In the mean time, spatially dispersed ageing population is becoming a challenging issue for public policy makers in many developed countries. Australia has opted to deal with this unprecedented ageing issue via an ‘ageing in place’ strategy, encouraging the elderly or seniors to live in their own housing for as long as possible, with only minimal support from public authorities. This strategy has been widely supported by the community. However, it poses a number of serious challenges for both policy makers and seniors alike. These include the issue of personal mobility and the ability to access those things that are deemed essential to ones well-being and quality of life from outside the home. The elderly or seniors are often identified as being subject to social exclusion because of difficulties associated with travelling outside their homes to access services and facilities, especially towards the outskirts of major urban centres, where services and facilities are generally only readily accessible by car. As drivers age and are required to surrender their driving licences, accessibility to a range of services and facilities either in their immediate neighbourhood or surrounding region will become a major issue especially in those locales where public transport infrastructure is inadequate.

The spatio-temporal variations of frost-free period in China from 1951 to 2012

The frost-free period (FFP), first frost date (FFD) and last frost date (LFD) have been regard as the important climate variables for agricultural production. Understanding the spatio-temporal variations of the FFP, FFD and LFD is beneficial to reduce the harmful impacts of climate change on agricultural production and enhance the agricultural adaptation. This study examined daily minimum temperatures for 823 national-level meteorological stations, calculated the values of FFD, LFD and FFP for station-specific and region-specific from 1951 to 2012, estimated the gradients of linear regression for station-specific moving averages of FFD, LFD and FFP, and assessed station-specific time series of FFP and detected the abrupt change. The results as follows: at both the station level and the regional level, the FFP across China decreases with the increase of latitude from south to north, and with the increase of altitude from east to west generally. At the station level, the inter-annual fluctuations of FFD, LFD and FFP in south and west agricultural regions are greater than those in north and east. At the regional level, excluding the QT region, temporal changes of FFP are relatively small in both the low-latitude and the high-latitude regions, but for the mid-latitude regions. According to the linear trend gradients of the moving average values of station-specific FFD, LFD and FFP, FFD was delayed, LFD advanced, and FFP extended gradually over the 80% of China. Furthermore, the change magnitudes for FFD, LFD and FFP in the north and east agricultural regions are higher than that in the southern and western. Among the 659 station-specific time series of FFP examined by the Mann-Kendall test, 341 stations, located mainly in the north region, have one identifiable and significant abrupt change. And at the 341 stations with identified abrupt changes, most (57%) abrupt changes occurred during 1991–2012, followed by the periods of 1981–1990 (28%), 1971–1980 (12%), and 1951–1970 (3%). The spatio-temporal variations of FFD, LFD and FFP would provide important guidance to agricultural practices.

Assessment of the comprehensive accessibility of regional road network on towhship scale

Regional comprehensive accessibility is the proximity of all locations to other specified locations in a region. Studies of regional accessibility have been primarily performed on a city or county scale. As the nerve ending of a road network, rural roads are distributed throughout a region. However, rural roads were rarely considered in previous studies. In this study, we focus on the scale of townships and include rural roads in the road network to measure accessibility. Using the GIS grid analysis method, we assessed the comprehensive accessibilities of Kaifeng City in China on a township scale. The regional accessibility analysis method on a city or county scale cannot be completely applied to township scale studies, which is reflected in the buffering area processing of closed roads. The accessibility of the townships in Kaifeng are characterized as irregular distributions in circular layers and primarily influenced by road network. Meanwhile, the spatial distribution of the medium and high accessibility values exhibits clustering, the low values are dispersed.