Search Results (13,367)

This article examines the development of Catholic reflection on media, communication, and technology from nineteenth-century debates over press freedom to contemporary interventions on artificial intelligence. Drawing on a purposively selected corpus of Catholic documents issued at the universal level between 1832 and 2026, it combines historical–hermeneutical reconstruction, comparative document analysis, and juridical–institutional interpretation. The study distinguishes three heuristic phases: defensive regulation and the construction of Catholic media institutions; pastoral appropriation, dialogue, media education, and digital adaptation; and, since 2020, an anthropological deepening accompanied by growing concern with the political, economic, juridical, and social structures of AI. Particular attention is given to the Rome Call for AI Ethics, the two papal messages of 2024, Antiqua et nova, and Magnifica humanitas. The article argues that this history does not reveal an unchanged doctrine of human dignity, but a developing anthropological concern whose vocabulary, theological grounding, and normative function change over time. Earlier concerns with truth, moral order, ecclesial responsibility, and the salvation of souls are progressively reformulated through communication as communion, participation, rights, human agency, and integral human development. Full article

Environmental administrative punishments are widely employed to deter corporate environmental misconduct while serving the overarching objective of sustainable development, yet their broader social impacts remain understudied. Using data on Shanghai- and Shenzhen-listed non-financial firms from 2007 to 2022 for examination, this study finds that such environmental administrative punishments reduce corporate employment growth by exacerbating firms’ internal and external financial constraints. Instrumental variable, propensity score matching, and DID approaches are used to address endogeneity concerns in this paper. Cross-sectional results indicate that the negative effect is mitigated by state ownership and local labor protection, but amplified in heavily polluting industries and by a high level of corporate internationalization. Further, although penalized firms exhibit lower employment growth, they optimize human capital structure to enhance green innovation, capturing the double-edged sword effect of environmental administrative punishments. These findings reveal the economic and social consequences of environmental punishments and provide policy implications for advancing effective environmental regulations and high-quality employment development. Full article

Against the dual backdrop of global ocean governance and food security, promoting the coordinated development of marine economic green development efficiency and inclusive growth is of significant practical importance for countries to improve marine ecology, narrow the wealth gap, and safeguard blue granary security. This study takes China’s three major marine economic circles and 11 coastal provinces from 2002 to 2024 as research subjects, employing methods including the Super-efficiency SBM model, the CRITIC-TOPSIS, Haken model, kernel density estimation, the Dagum Gini coefficient, and the ARIMA time series model to measure the spatiotemporal evolution of the synergy between marine economic green development efficiency and inclusive growth, as well as to forecast future trends. The results indicate that (1) the synergy level of the three major marine economic circles has been continuously increasing, with the full coastal zone’s synergy level rising from 0.48 in 2002 to 0.81 in 2024, with inclusive growth playing a dominant role throughout the period; (2) the synergy level of all Chinese provinces has been continuously improving with narrowing disparities—the Gini coefficient declined from 0.252 to 0.072, and the hypervariable density contributed an annual average of 47.22%; and (3) forecasts show that, from 2025 to 2029, the full coastal zone’s synergy level will rise from 0.82 to 0.84, with all economic circles showing an upward trend. The findings of this study can provide references for global coastal economies in formulating marine green sustainable development policies. Full article

Index-based urban sustainability studies often ask whether urban resilience and economic development evolve harmoniously, but the answer is unreliable when the two constructs contain the same economic indicators. A targeted audit of recent Chinese coupling studies shows that economic variables are commonly embedded in urban-resilience systems without a reported construct-overlap weight check. Using Hebei, China, as a measurement-validity test rather than as another provincial economic-growth case, this study analyzes a balanced 2014–2023 panel of 11 prefecture-level cities. Duplicated economic concepts account for 44.4% of the baseline resilience-index entropy weight and 88.2% of the baseline economic-index weight, indicating substantial mechanical exposure in the resilience-development correlation (Pearson r = 0.953). We, therefore, construct a measured non-economic service-infrastructure-ecological resilience-capacity index and a separate economic-development index. The redesigned index is not a comprehensive urban-resilience measure because it excludes governance, social capital, emergency response, hazard exposure, social vulnerability, and institutional adaptation. Removing only the shared resilience-side components lowers the all-year correlation to 0.783; after full redesign, it is 0.562. In constant 2014 prices, economic development rises sharply from 2014 to 2023, whereas measured non-economic resilience capacity improves modestly. Robustness tests separate stable city findings from measurement-sensitive ones: Langfang and Shijiazhuang remain economy-ahead across all 13 selected specifications, while Cangzhou does so in 11 of 13, Tangshan is economy-ahead in 11 of 13 selected specifications but sensitive to the gas-supply proxy, and Qinhuangdao and Xingtai remain measured-capacity-ahead across all specifications. The measured non-economic resilience capacity shows a detectable global autocorrelation under queen contiguity, whereas a mismatch shows no statistically detectable global autocorrelation under the tested specifications. The primary contribution is methodological: a construct-overlap audit and directional mismatch diagnosis that identifies relative differences between economic development and measured public-service, infrastructure, utility, and ecological resilience capacity. These diagnostics do not establish a causal conversion failure. Full article

Spatiotemporal differentiation and coupled driving mechanisms of urban ecological resilience in transboundary composite economic belts remain an understudied niche within human–land coupling system research. Taking 29 prefecture-level and county-level units of the Huaihe River Eco-Economic Belt from 2014 to 2023 as research samples, this study constructs an ecological resilience evaluation framework tailored to the pollution disturbance characteristics of the Huaihe River Basin under a three-dimensional theoretical framework encompassing resistance, adaptability, and recoverability. The entropy weight method is adopted to calculate comprehensive ecological resilience values, while the geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model is applied to identify spatiotemporal heterogeneous correlations among multiple influencing factors. This paper further characterizes the spatiotemporal evolutionary patterns of urban ecological resilience across the study area and unpacks the coupled associative effects of natural, economic, and social driving factors. The empirical results reveal three key findings: (1) Temporally, the overall comprehensive ecological resilience of the study region rose from 0.318 to 0.416, with a total growth rate of 30.91%. Its evolutionary trajectory follows three successive phases: rapid growth, steady improvement, and slow saturation. Adaptability, which is predominantly boosted by anthropogenic environmental governance, constitutes the primary contributor to resilience growth. The range of urban resilience values narrowed by 9.97%, indicating continuous advancement in balanced regional development. (2) Spatially, ecological resilience presents a prominent core-periphery pattern, with high-resilience zones concentrated in mountainous southwestern areas and low-resilience zones distributed across northeastern plains. All low-resilience county-level units were eliminated by 2023. (3) In terms of driving associations, topographic relief and environmental governance investment maintain persistent positive correlations with ecological resilience, while per capita GDP acts as the core economic supportive factor. The proportion of secondary industry and population density exhibit significant negative correlations with resilience. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) shifts from a negative correlation to a weak positive correlation alongside progressive ecological restoration, whereas river network variables exert negligible long-term associative impacts. Collectively, the spatiotemporally heterogeneous coupling of natural endowments, industrial-economic conditions, and social governance factors shapes the evolutionary patterns of regional ecological resilience. This study fills the research gap regarding long-timescale resilience driving mechanisms for transprovincial composite river basins covering five provinces. It identifies novel human–land coupling mechanisms, including the temporal reversal of vegetation’s ecological benefits and the dual stress imposed by industrial agglomeration and dense human settlements in plain regions. The quantitative outputs of this research can provide data-based references for differentiated coordinated ecological governance across the Huaihe Ecological Economic Belt. Full article

Viral diseases are one of the most destructive threats to global agriculture. Among plant viruses, tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) is a highly contagious pathogen infecting numerous economically vital crops. With no curable treatments, the only strategy to mitigate virus spread is early detection and plant removal. The gold standard for TMV detection is reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), followed by agarose gel electrophoresis. To reduce TMV diagnosis time and eliminate the requirement for expensive equipment, this study developed and optimized a one-step RT-PCR-coupled cysteamine-functionalized gold nanoparticle assay for the colorimetric determination of the virus. By integrating cDNA synthesis and PCR amplification into a single tube and analyzing the results using cysteamine- functionalized gold nanoparticles (Au@Cys), the diagnosis turnaround time was significantly reduced. Furthermore, this AuNPs-based colorimetric assay enabled straightforward visual inspection with the naked eye, eliminating the need for costly optical devices. Additionally, our regression equation linking RT-PCR product color values, extracted as mean A value based on the CIELAB color space (green-red axis), and viral load allows for the accurate quantification of TMV infection levels in field samples. Our research lays the groundwork for the further development of more cost-effective, quantitative and rapid plant virus diagnosis methods. Full article

Dam-break floods pose severe threats to downstream urban areas due to their sudden onset, rapid propagation, and potentially catastrophic socioeconomic consequences. This study develops a multi-indicator fuzzy comprehensive evaluation framework for urban flood risk assessment under dam-break scenarios. The framework integrates hydrodynamic simulation outputs with geographic information system-based spatial analysis to characterize spatial variations in flood risk. It incorporates flood hazard factors (inundation depth, arrival time, and inundation duration) derived from a coupled one-dimensional/two-dimensional hydrodynamic model and socioeconomic vulnerability factors (population density and road network density) derived from spatial statistics. Indicator weights were determined using a combined Analytic Hierarchy Process and entropy-weight method, and risk levels were obtained through membership-function calculation and spatial overlay analysis. The framework was applied to the Dongpu and Dafangying reservoirs in Hefei, China, under a scenario of simultaneous dam failure during a probable maximum flood. Results show that, compared with hazard-only assessment, the comprehensive evaluation substantially reduced the extent of high-risk areas and altered their spatial distribution. Very high-risk zones were concentrated along the upstream main channel, where high-velocity floodwaters coincide with dense population and economic activity. Flood arrival time and population density were identified as the most influential indicators in the proposed risk assessment framework. The proposed framework provides a more comprehensive and spatially refined tool for urban dam-break flood risk management and emergency decision-making. Full article

Achieving energy sustainability is a major challenge across all sectors of an economy. In agri-food systems (AFSs), this challenge is twofold in the context of energy sustainability; one challenge is to reduce fossil fuel dependency, and another challenge is to provide safe and nutritious food for humans and animals. An appropriate aggregate indicator needs to be used for assessing the energy sustainability of AFSs. This study presents a systematic literature review aimed at developing a core indicators framework to support both research and policymaking. It also critically evaluates and updates existing indicators currently used to evaluate energy sustainability in AFSs, considering environmental, economic, social and technical dimensions. Environmental indicators, such as energy use efficiency, net energy balance, carbon footprint, exergy destruction and renewable energy share, measure the ecological impacts of agricultural practices. Economic indicators, including energy cost share, levelized cost of energy, energy return on investment, and productivity per unit of energy input, reflect how energy use influences farm competitiveness and resilience. Social indicators such as equitable access to energy, labor productivity gains, and system resilience to energy shocks highlight the broader human and societal aspects of energy sustainability. Technical indicators, including technology performance, maintenance intensity, technology lifespan, and resource circularity, emphasize the need to minimize resource depletion and environmental harm. Together, these sustainability indicators provide a strong framework for assessing trade-offs and guiding policy decisions that support the transition toward low-carbon, resilient, and resource-efficient AFSs. Their effective development and implementation require interdisciplinary knowledge integration and active engagement with relevant societal stakeholders in a transdisciplinary sustainability context. Full article

Food waste represents not only a material and environmental problem, but also a loss of economic, social, and environmental value embedded throughout the food system. This study proposes the Circulus Valor framework as an exploratory conceptual perspective that integrates Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration, and Communication into the discussion of food waste recycling and value retention. The 20-item questionnaire was organized into four a priori conceptual domains and underwent expert review by seven specialists and pilot testing with 60 participants. The pilot instrument showed satisfactory preliminary internal consistency (overall α = 0.927; domain-level α = 0.814–0.881), with corrected item–total correlations ranging from 0.41 to 0.74. The main analysis was based on 711 valid responses, including 101 respondents affiliated with the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The pooled 20-item set showed high internal consistency (α = 0.954). Creativity recorded the highest mean score (3.37), followed by Critical Thinking (3.33), Collaboration (3.19), and Communication (2.92), while the author-defined 4C Index was 3.20. Inter-domain correlations ranged from 0.63 to 0.77, indicating substantial positive association and overlap, but not factorial distinctiveness. The Circulus Valor Score (CVS = 0.64) is reported as an exploratory descriptive summary of balance among the four domain scores. The findings are perception-based and do not validate a four-factor scale, establish discriminant validity, or demonstrate causal relationships with objective food waste or value-retention outcomes. Full article

In the context of China’s carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, clarifying whether the Yellow River Basin can achieve a decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions and sustain regional development through deep decarbonization is critical to both ecological protection and high-quality development of the region. This study integrates the Tapio decoupling model, the geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model, and an author-developed LEAP-YRB v5 macro-sectoral hybrid model to examine 95 prefecture-level cities from 2010 to 2022 and to project energy consumption and carbon emissions for the nine YRB provincial-level regions from 2022 to 2060. The results show that: (1) the urban decoupling status fluctuated among expansive coupling, strong decoupling, and weak decoupling, with weak decoupling becoming dominant and increasing to 62 cities in 2022; (2) per capita GDP and urbanization tended to increase the decoupling index and therefore inhibited decoupling, whereas more intensive construction-land use promoted decoupling, and industrial structure upgrading and green patents showed context-dependent effects; and (3) the basin cannot peak its emissions under the business-as-usual scenario, while the policy-driven scenario peaks at approximately 3.357 billion tons of CO₂ around 2030. Under the carbon-neutrality-oriented scenario, net emissions decline substantially to 825 million tons by 2060, indicating deep decarbonization but not full carbon neutrality. Full neutrality would require additional carbon sinks, cross-regional clean-electricity integration, stronger power-sector decarbonization, or negative-emission technologies beyond the endogenous measures represented in the model. Full article

Structural changes occurring within a country’s economy are reflected in the composition of employment across economic sectors. Employment adapts to different stages of socio-economic development and can serve as an important indicator of economic growth or crisis, since changes in the level of employment accompany overall economic development. Therefore, analyzing the sectoral distribution of employment by type of economic activity is of both theoretical and practical importance under contemporary conditions. This article examines the methodological aspects of assessing structural changes in population employment based on an analysis of broader structural transformations, which allows for the estimation of the magnitude of changes across specific types of economic activity in the Republic of Tajikistan. The analysis is based on official employment statistics published by the Statistical Agency under the President of the Republic of Tajikistan for the period 2011–2022. The results indicate that agriculture, hunting, and forestry remained the dominant source of employment throughout the study period, although its share gradually declined, while employment increased in education, health and social services, and several service-related activities. Furthermore, this study investigates internal changes in the number of employed persons by type of activity within the overall sectoral employment composition, thereby reflecting the dynamics of changes in employment across other sectors of economic activity. Full article

The development of the tourism sector is one of the main objectives of the Vision 2030 reform package introduced by Saudi Arabia in 2016 to develop a resilient, knowledge-based and competitive economy. However, the determinants of tourism development from the perspective of reduced climate vulnerability and visa liberalization are rarely researched in the case of Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, this research paper focuses on investigating the impacts of reduced climate vulnerability and visa liberalization policy on tourism development using data from Saudi Arabia for the period 1995–2024. This study measures climate vulnerability using the ND-GAIN Index, which captures both climate vulnerability and climate readiness, while the visa liberalization policy is captured through a dummy variable. For the estimation of the model, this study uses the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration approach, which simultaneously produces both the long-run and short-run relationships between the independent variables and the dependent variable. This study’s findings demonstrate that reduced climate vulnerability or greater national readiness for climate change is positively linked with increased international tourist arrivals both in the long-run and short-run horizons. Similarly, the results also prove the importance of the visa liberalization policy on the development of the tourism sector in the long run. Moreover, the results indicate that trade openness and income level are the main driving forces behind the development of the tourism sector in the long run. Furthermore, this study’s results further show that the rate of inflation is detrimental to the development of the tourism sector, as it directly enhances the cost of traveling. This research study contributes to the sustainability discourse by visualizing how policy-driven interventions can safeguard tourism growth in climate-vulnerable economies. Finally, this study offers important policy implications related to sustainable tourism planning and economic diversification under the framework of Vision 2030 in Saudi Arabia. Full article

Achieving a balance between economic expansion and environmental preservation is a core challenge of sustainable development. Based on panel data from 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta region from 2006 to 2023, this study develops a digital economy index, measures GTFP using the SBM-GML framework, and examines the relationship between digital economy development and GTFP. The results show that digital economy development is positively associated with GTFP, and the findings remain robust after a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. Further moderating analysis indicates that industrial structure rationalization, industrial structure advancement, green innovation, and ecological compensation policy strengthen the relationship between digital economy development and GTFP. Heterogeneity analysis shows that this relationship is stronger in high-tier cities, highly urbanized cities, and Broadband China demonstration cities. Spatial analysis further suggests that digital economy development may generate spillover effects through intercity linkages within the Yangtze River Delta. By integrating digital transformation, ecological governance, regional interdependence, and green productivity improvement into a unified analytical framework, this study provides city-level evidence for promoting coordinated green transformation and sustainable regional development. Full article

The surging integration of volatile renewable energy severely exacerbates power grid frequency fluctuations, yet conventional frequency regulation (FR) market clearing mechanisms fail to efficiently coordinate heterogeneous energy storage systems (ESSs) due to the complete decoupling of multi-dimensional physical performance from economic dispatch. To resolve this critical industry bottleneck, this paper proposes a novel Stackelberg game-based clearing mechanism tailored for diverse ESS participation. A bi-level optimization framework is constructed to internalize physical FR characteristics into market economics; the upper level minimizes the system operator’s total procurement costs by transforming multi-dimensional physical metrics—including dynamic response rates, time delays, and control accuracy—into endogenous performance penalty factors. Concurrently, the lower level maximizes the individual revenues of heterogeneous ESS aggregators under a Gini coefficient-based fairness constraint to mitigate profit monopolization and promote a more sustainable market ecology. To address the computational challenges of high-dimensional non-convexity, an enhanced hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Quadratic Programming (GA-QP) solver is developed to secure robust convergence to the Stackelberg equilibrium. Comprehensive simulation results confirm that the proposed Stackelberg game-based clearing mechanism enables a highly rational, quality-driven allocation of frequency regulation capacity. By dynamically linking physical performance metrics with economic benefit factors, it successfully achieves an optimal balance of interests between heterogeneous energy storage aggregators and the overarching market. Crucially, compared to conventional purely economic models, this mechanism structurally prevents absolute technology monopoly—drastically reducing the market Gini coefficient from a hazardous 0.85 to a healthy 0.32—while sustaining multi-party equity at a negligible system cost increase of only 1.64%. Ultimately, this framework offers a highly feasible and resilient solution for the efficient clearing of multi-type energy storage in modern power systems. Full article

Porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) is a major enteric coronavirus that causes severe economic losses to the global swine industry. Current vaccines suffer from weak immunogenicity, insufficient mucosal immunity, and a short duration of protection. Nanoparticle delivery systems have emerged as a promising strategy for next-generation vaccine development. In the present study, we constructed an S1-Ferritin nanoparticle vaccine using the SpyTag-SpyCatcher modular conjugation system. The morphology, particle size, and uniformity of the nanoparticle vaccine were systematically characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and dynamic light scattering (DLS). After two immunizations, the S-Ferritin nanoparticle vaccine elicited potent humoral and cellular immune responses in both mice and piglets. In piglets, at 2 weeks post booster vaccination, PEDV-specific serum IgG endpoint titers peaked at 1:2560, virus-neutralizing antibody titers reached 1:256 against the JS-2/2015 strain, and serum IFN-γ levels reached 274 pg/mL. All these immunological indicators were significantly higher than those observed in the PEDV-inactivated whole-virus vaccine group. Furthermore, challenge tests showed that the S1-Ferritin nanoparticle vaccine provided complete protection against PEDV infection and significantly reduced the severity of diarrhea and intestinal damage in piglets after challenge. These findings suggest that the S1-Ferritin nanoparticle vaccine constitutes a promising candidate against PEDV infection, though our study is only a preliminary step and subsequent field trials in pigs are still required. Full article