Search Results (808)

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has driven a surge in demand for computing power. As the core computing infrastructure, data centers have expanded in scale, escalating electricity consumption and magnifying a regional mismatch between computing capacity and energy resources: facilities are concentrated in the energy-constrained East, while the renewable-rich West possesses vast, untapped hosting capacity. Focusing on cross-regional data-center migration under the “Eastern Data, Western Computing” initiative, this study constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model comprising the Eastern Local Government, the Western Local Government, and data-center enterprises. The central government is modeled as an external regulator that indirectly shapes players’ strategies through policies such as energy-efficiency constraints and carbon-quota mechanisms. First, we introduce key parameters—including energy efficiency, carbon costs, green revenues, coordination subsidies, and migration losses—and analyze the system’s evolutionary stability using replicator-dynamics equations. Second, we conduct numerical simulations in MATLAB 2024a and perform sensitivity analyses with respect to energy and green constraints, central rewards and penalties, regional coordination incentives, and migration losses. The results show the following: (1) Multiple equilibria can arise, including coordinated optima, policy-failure states, and coordination-impeded outcomes. These coordinated optima do not emerge spontaneously but rather depend on a precise alignment of payoff structures across central government, local governments, and enterprises. (2) The eastern regulatory push—centered on energy efficiency and carbon emissions—is generally more effective than western fiscal subsidies or stand-alone energy advantages at reshaping firm payoffs and inducing relocation. Central penalties and coordination subsidies serve complementary and constraining roles. (3) Commercial risks associated with full migration, such as service interruption and customer attrition, remain among the key barriers to shifting from partial to full migration. These risks are closely linked to practical relocation and connectivity constraints—such as logistics and commissioning effort, and cross-regional network latency/bandwidth—thereby potentially trapping firms in a suboptimal partial-migration equilibrium. This study provides theoretical support for refining the “Eastern Data, Western Computing” policy mix and offers generalized insights for other economies facing similar spatial energy–demand asymmetries. Full article

Groundwater sustains more than 60% of irrigation in Pakistan’s Indus Basin, yet accelerating depletion, rising salinity and fragmented governance threaten agricultural productivity and rural livelihoods. Although new monitoring technologies and provincial water laws have emerged, a persistent gap remains between scientific evidence, policy frameworks and farmer practices. This study applies the Science–Policy–Practice Interface (SPPI) to examine these disconnects, drawing on qualitative data from multi-stakeholder focus groups and interviews with farmers, scientists and policymakers in Punjab, Sindh and federal agencies. The analysis identifies five governance challenges: weak knowledge integration, fragmented institutions, political resistance to regulation, limited adaptive capacity and under-recognition of farmer-led innovations. While depletion is well documented, it rarely informs enforceable rules and informal practices often outweigh formal regulation. At the same time, farmers contribute adaptive strategies, such as recharge initiatives and water-sharing arrangements, that remain invisible to policy. The findings highlight both the potential and the limits of SPPI. It provides a valuable lens for aligning science, policy and practice but cannot overcome entrenched political economy barriers such as subsidies and elite capture. The study contributes theoretically by extending SPPI to irrigation-dependent aquifers and practically by identifying opportunities for hybrid knowledge systems to support adaptive and equitable groundwater governance in Pakistan and other LMICs. Full article

Data, as a key production factor in modern logistics systems, plays a crucial role in enhancing industry efficiency and promoting supply chain coordination. To address challenges in data sharing among logistics enterprises—such as conflicts of interest, unequal risk allocation, and insufficient security governance—this study develops a tripartite evolutionary game model involving logistics enterprises, data partners, and supervisory institutions. The payoff matrix incorporates prospect theory to account for risk attitudes, loss–gain perceptions, and subjective judgments. Stable equilibrium points are derived using the Jacobian matrix, and numerical simulations examine strategic evolution under varying parameters. Results indicate that increased returns for data partners reduce their motivation to provide truthful data, while higher enterprise profits suppress logistics enterprises’ willingness to share. Compensation levels have limited impact, whereas excessively high supervision subsidies weaken participation and oversight across all parties. Stronger penalties and higher-level enforcement significantly promote compliance and positive system evolution. Enterprise investment positively correlates with data-sharing behavior, and risk preferences of all parties accelerate convergence to stable equilibria. Conversely, excessively low risk preference in supervisory institutions may lead to an unstable “sharing–false data–non-regulation” pattern. These findings provide theoretical support and policy guidance for designing a dynamic governance mechanism that balances incentives, constraints, and collaboration, thereby facilitating secure and effective logistics data sharing and informing the development of the data factor market. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified labor shortages and safety challenges in Jordan’s construction sector, revealing systemic vulnerabilities in its reliance on migrant workers. This study evaluates an advanced robotic bricklaying system through simulation of 10 residential buildings (80 units) under Jordanian building codes (JSBC 2020) and strict pandemic constraints, including workforce absenteeism rates of 30% based on ILO data and Ministry of Health density protocols. The simulation-based analysis, which focuses specifically on standardized housing designs, demonstrates 84% faster bricklaying (6.75 vs. 43.2 days/unit), 94% productivity retention during absenteeism, 15% mortar waste reduction (advancing SDG 9), and 60% lower transmission risk versus manual methods. Despite higher rental costs (15,168 JD vs. 12,946 JD/unit), accelerated construction timelines substantially reduced overhead expenses, yielding a rapid <5-month payback period. Policy recommendations target vocational training programs and financial subsidies for small contractors, aligning with Jordan’s Economic Modernization Vision (2022–2024). Limitations involve architectural irregularities and supply chain dependencies; future work requires field validation to complement these simulation findings. Full article

Farmers’ low-carbon transition has become a critical issue for achieving sustainable agricultural development. Fundamentally, this transition is driven by multi-actor collaboration and is subject to stochastic disturbances. However, the collaborative governance mechanisms that facilitate farmers’ low-carbon transformation remain insufficiently understood, particularly under the influence of random factors. To address this gap, we construct a four-party game model involving farmers, government, enterprises, and financial institutions by employing a stochastic evolutionary game approach that incorporates random disturbance factors to capture real-world uncertainty. Numerical simulations are conducted to examine how different policy tools and external environments shape the system’s evolutionary path. The results show the following: (1) In the early transition stage, external uncertainties cause notable fluctuations in strategy evolution, during which the government, farmers, and enterprises gradually form a collaborative mechanism, while financial institutions remain reluctant to participate due to risk and policy uncertainty. (2) Government subsidies, profit returns, and risk-sharing mechanisms exhibit a substitutive relationship, and an appropriate mix of these tools can effectively enhance the willingness of farmers and enterprises to adopt low-carbon practices. (3) Excessive government incentives may crowd out the role of green credit from financial institutions. (4) The profit-sharing ratio among farmers exerts the strongest motivational effect in the early stage, while higher levels of risk-sharing and reputation benefits are more effective in stabilizing the system structure and enhancing transition resilience. This study reveals the dynamic mechanisms of multi-actor interaction in agricultural low-carbon transition and provides theoretical and policy insights for differentiated government strategies and collaborative emission reduction. Full article

Compared with single indicators such as total factor productivity and financial performance, enterprise competitiveness represents the pivotal factor for energy storage enterprises (ESEs) to survive, develop and maintain a leading position in the market. Government subsidies are crucial for guiding the development of the energy storage industry. As countries globally increase their financial backing for ESEs, efficiently utilizing these subsidies has become a major focus. In this study, we examine the impact and mechanisms of government subsidies on the competitiveness of ESEs, using panel data from 248 listed ESEs in China between 2014 and 2023. Employing a range of analytical methods, including two-way fixed effects regression, instrumental variable estimation, and propensity score matching (PSM) tests, the findings demonstrate that government subsidies significantly enhance the competitiveness of ESEs, particularly for non-state-owned ESEs, energy storage system integration enterprises, and ESEs in resource-rich provinces. Further analysis indicates that research and development (R&D) expenditure and financial constraints act as key channels through which subsidies influence competitiveness. Furthermore, electricity prices exert a positive effect on the competitiveness of ESEs, with government subsidies and electricity prices exhibiting a significant substitution relationship in this regard. These findings offer valuable insights for exploring the role of government subsidies in advancing the sustainable development of the energy storage industry and supporting the transition towards achieving dual-carbon goals, while also providing important references for the development of the energy storage industry in other emerging economies. Full article

This paper presents a comprehensive economic comparison between renewable and fossil-fuel-based heating systems for a newly constructed residential building in Kraków, Poland, over the period 2022–2030. The analysis introduces the concept of Corrected Final Energy Consumption (CFEC) as a harmonized measure for comparing various energy sources and applies the Present Value of Total Lifecycle Cost (PVTLC) as an appropriate financial metric for non-commercial residential investments. Four heating options were examined: district heating system (DHS), gas boiler, air-to-water heat pump, and heat pump combined with photovoltaic (PV) panels. Based on real tariffs and standardized data from the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), the DHS option demonstrated the lowest lifecycle cost, while the air-to-water heat pump—despite environmental advantages—proved the most expensive without substantial subsidies. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the strong influence of investment subsidies and fuel price fluctuations on the competitiveness of alternative systems. The findings highlight the methodological shortcomings of conventional annual-cost approaches and propose PVTLC as a more reliable decision-making tool for residential energy planning. The study also discusses regulatory, climatic, and behavioral factors affecting investment outcomes and emphasizes the need to integrate financial, environmental, and social criteria when evaluating household-level energy solutions. Full article

As a pioneering initiative in the advancement of green finance, China’s Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zone (GFPZ) offers critical empirical and theoretical insights for the development of a global green financial system. While existing studies highlight the GFPZ’s role in promoting pollution reduction within designated regions, it remains unclear whether its effects extend along supply chains. Exploiting the GFPZ policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employing a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, this study uses panel data from A-share listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges in China from 2013 to 2021 to assess its impact. The findings reveal the following: (1) The GFPZ significantly reduces emissions not only among focal heavily polluting firms but also across their upstream and downstream partners. (2) The primary transmission channel is a financing penalty spillover, whereby the policy intensifies financing constraints and reduces credit access for supply chain firms, compelling them to scale down operations. Notably, the evidence does not support the presence of a Porter effect. (3) Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the spillover effect is more pronounced among upstream suppliers and firms with stronger green capacities, while excessive government subsidies tend to weaken the transmission of policy impacts. Full article

Agroecology offers a transformative pathway toward sustainable food systems by integrating ecological, economic, and social dimensions of farming. While its conceptual and policy foundations are increasingly recognized in European Union (EU) strategies, the practical adoption of agroecological principles at the farm level remains uneven, particularly in socio-economically peripheral Member States. This article investigates the enabling and constraining factors of agroecological uptake in three EU countries—Czech Republic, Hungary, and Portugal, using a mixed qualitative approach that combined literature review, policy mapping, and 42 in-depth farmer interviews conducted in 2020–2021. Data were analyzed through a shared coding framework, iterative team discussions, and a standardized comparative matrix to ensure cross-country validity. The results reveal shared barriers, including limited institutional coordination, subsidy dependency, and structural land inequalities, alongside country-specific dynamics such as farmer-to-farmer learning in Portugal, family-farm identity in Czechia, and trust-based advisory relations in Hungary. The findings underscore that systemic constraints, rather than conceptual gaps, impede agroecological transitions, and highlight the need for context-sensitive policy instruments, advisory reforms, and training programs aligned with agroecological principles. The paper contributes to the literature by providing empirical insight into farmer attitudes and practices in Central and Southern Europe and by offering actionable recommendations for designing policies and training. Full article

Regional economic diversity and unevenly allocated space-based resources have created unprecedented difficulties for collaborative and innovative supply chain construction. This paper sets up a tripartite evolutionary model of the government, upstream companies, and downstream companies to explore dynamic processes of regional supply chain collaborative innovation with bounded rationality. Through incorporation of hierarchical space organizations and policy incentive differentiation mechanisms, the model discerns actors’ behavioral evolution and strategic adjustment in a geographically divided structure. Adopting evolutionary game theory and numerical simulation, this paper includes crucial parameters like the conversion efficiency of return conversion, information-sharing coefficient, mutual trust coefficient, and fiscal subsidy coefficient for examining policy and spatial heterogeneity effects on information collaborative innovations. The results reveal that fiscal incentives are the primary driving factor for collaborative evolution across local supply chains. Adaptive profit-sharing and subsidy intensities both stimulate upstream innovation investments and downstream cooperation adoption efficiently, stimulating a shift out of inefficient equilibrium states towards sustainable high-cooperation states. Furthermore, the restructuring of space accelerates hierarchical differentiation—core region companies are able to act like initiators and leaders for collaborative innovations, while periphery companies encounter participatory barriers in terms of elevated coordination costs and incentive shortages. In light of this, it is therefore crucial to have a “core-driven, periphery-subsidized” policy system for eliminating spatial gaps, stimulating cross-regional information exchange, and building systemic robustness. These findings contribute to enhancing the overall efficiency, stability, and innovation capacity of regional supply chain systems. They also provide a theoretical basis for policy decision making and industrial upgrading across regions of varying scales and environments. Full article

The rapid growth of China’s electric vehicle (EV) market has led to a peak in end-of-life (EOL) power batteries, yet the recycling sector remains dominated by informal operations. This paper incorporates the formal and informal recycling participation behaviours of EV owners into the framework of evolutionary games, systematically examines the mechanism by which governmental incentive and disincentive mechanisms influence the evolutionary stability of each party, and constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model involving the government, recycling enterprises, and EV owners. Numerical simulation experiments conducted using PyCharm 2.3 provide an in-depth exploration of the strategic evolutionary trajectories of each participating agent. The findings indicate that (1) the stable strategy for the game-theoretic system of EOL power battery recycling is government non-regulation, recycling enterprises adopting formal recycling practices, and EV owners participating in formal recycling; (2) strengthening penalties against recycling enterprises will accelerate their transition towards formal recycling strategies, while increasing incentive levels can significantly enhance the steady-state probability of firms opting for formal recycling; (3) government subsidies for EV owners encourage both EV owners and recycling enterprises to adopt formal recycling, with recycling enterprises shifting first. This study enriches the application of evolutionary game theory in the field of EOL power battery recycling and further provides guidance for the healthy development of the recycling industry. Full article

The factors influencing the use of renewable energy in ten significant emerging economies (E-10: Argentina, Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Poland, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey) are examined in this study for the years 1990–2021. In order to capture both contemporaneous and intertemporal drivers of renewable energy demand, the analysis uses dynamic panel techniques (GMM) in conjunction with static panel estimations (fixed and random effects), drawing on a balanced panel dataset. The empirical findings highlight the path-dependent character of the energy transition by pointing to a clear persistence effect, in which previous renewable energy consumption significantly and favorably influences current levels. While oil prices and carbon emissions exert adverse pressures, economic growth and financial development are consistently recognized as key facilitators of the adoption of renewable energy. In several specifications, population growth appears as a constraining factor. Both static and dynamic models show that urbanization has a negative impact on the use of renewable energy. Therefore, incorporating renewable energy considerations into urban development policies may help reverse this trend and promote increased use of renewable energy. When combined, the results show how strategically important it is to promote economic growth, strengthen financial systems, and incorporate sustainability into urbanization processes. The urgent need to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, reroute financial resources toward green investment, and fortify carbon mitigation frameworks are among the policy implications. In the end, the evidence favors a multifaceted policy framework for the E-10 nations to hasten the switch to renewable energy. Full article

The energy transition is an essential process for mitigating the effects of climate change in a global context where recent conflicts threaten energy security. Municipalities play an increasing role in achieving the decarbonization targets set at a national level, but they need effective tools to identify the most appropriate actions and policies for achieving quantitative targets. Among the tools available, energy models allow us to represent the evolution of the energy system under different boundary conditions or constraints and defining the least-cost pathways for sustainable development. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of a bottom-up modeling approach in the framework of the ETSAP TIMES model generator to represent and optimize the local-scale energy system of the city of Tito in Southern Italy, with a particular focus on the residential and tertiary sectors. The optimization of a Business-as-Usual reference scenario over a thirty-year time horizon (2020–2050) shows an initial situation based on the prevalent use of natural gas. The sensitivity analysis carried out by gradually increasing the cost of natural gas and providing subsidies for the purchase of heat pumps shows a 92% reduction in fossil fuel consumption and a 60% for CO₂ emissions as early as 2030. Full article

A strategic fulcrum for leading high-quality economic development and shaping the nation’s future. Core competitiveness lies in how governments can effectively stimulate consumer demand for green consumption and motivate enterprises to pursue green technology innovation through the development of precise and efficient innovative regulation models. In this paper, a tripartite evolutionary game model is constructed based on evolutionary game theory, encompassing the government, enterprises, and consumers. We analyze the strategic interactions and evolutionary path among these three entities under conditions of bounded rationality and information asymmetry. The research reveals the following: (1) the government can effectively guide enterprises towards genuine green innovation through enhanced rewards for substantive innovation and increased penalties for strategic innovation; (2) consumer purchasing decisions are significantly shaped by economic benefits, perceived social value, and government subsidies, with their market choices forming a critical external supervisory force; and (3) government regulatory strategies are dynamically adjusted in response to market integrity levels and social welfare, with a tendency to implement innovative regulation when “greenwashing” risk is elevated. In conclusion, simulation analysis is conducted using MATLAB 2018a, and governance recommendations are offered based on three dimensions: precise government regulation, enhanced corporate responsibility, and enhanced consumer capabilities. These recommendations offer both a theoretical basis and a practical path for establishing an integrated green innovation governance system based on incentive constraint empowerment. Full article

This study focuses on highway service areas. Building upon prior research that identified key influencing factors through surveys and ISM–MICMAC analysis, it constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model involving the government, service area operators, and carbon reduction technology providers based on stakeholder theory. Combined with MATLAB simulations, the model reveals the dynamic patterns of the carbon reduction system. The results indicate that government strategies exert the strongest influence on the system and catalyze the other two parties, followed by service area operators. Carbon reduction technology providers adopt a more cautious stance in decision-making. Government actions shape system evolution through a “cost-benefit-incentive” triple mechanism, with its strategies exhibiting significant spillover effects on other actors. Enterprise behavior is markedly influenced by Xinjiang’s regional characteristics, where the core barriers to corporate carbon reduction lie in the costs of proactive equipment and technological investments. The willingness of technology providers to cooperate primarily depends on two drivers: incremental baseline benefits and enhanced economies of scale. The core trade-off in government decision-making lies between the cost of strong regulation (Cg1) and the cost of environmental governance under weak regulation (Cg2). An increase in Cg1 prolongs the government’s convergence time by 233.3% and indirectly suppresses the willingness of enterprises and technology providers due to weakened subsidy capacity. Enterprises are relatively sensitive to the investment costs of carbon reduction equipment and technology, with convergence time extending by 120%. Technology providers are highly sensitive to incremental baseline returns (Rt), with stabilization time extending by 500%. Compared to existing research, this model quantitatively reveals the “cost-benefit-incentive” triple transmission mechanism for carbon reduction coordination in “grid-end” regions, identifying key parameters for strategic shifts among stakeholders. Based on this, corresponding policy recommendations are provided for all three parties, offering precise and actionable directions for the sustainable advancement of carbon reduction efforts in service areas. The research conclusions can provide a replicable collaborative framework for decarbonizing transportation infra-structure in grid-end regions with high clean energy endowments. Full article