. Policy interdependency, although crucial to address the increasingly intertwined environmental challenges, is difficult to explicitly define and measure, compromising our abilities to link governance capacity with its societal and ecological outcomes. We conceptualized policy interdependency as a network of public infrastructure providers (PIPs), resource users (RUs), and resources (Rs) connected by substantive and procedural policy instruments. By integrating content-based qualitative and network-based quantitative analyses, we unfolded the evolution of the water, land, and environmental policy network in Victoria, Australia since the 1860s. It was found that there were four stages of policy interdependency in Victoria: Stage I (1860s-1900s) focused on developing substantive policy instruments on land with limited interdependency; Stage II (1900s-1940s) was characterized by weak procedural policy interdependencies regulating interactions among various PIPs on water; Stage III (1940s-1970s) was marked by increasing substantive interdependencies among different levels of PIPs for land and water; and at Stage IV (1970s-2000s) the procedural interdependencies among PIPs was still weak for integrated management of water, land, and the environment. This development pathway has resulted in a centralized governance system that reinforced information sharing primarily among existing actors, but limited communications with new, peripheral actors. Strong substantive interdependencies were effective in mobilizing the relationships between actors and resources while the effects of procedural interdependencies were weak. The Victorian land, water, and environmental governance provide insightful lessons for other regions in managing multiple interconnected resources.

The role of social memory in building community resilience against flood risk is increasingly recognized. However, the process of constructing social memory remains systemically unexamined. This study developed a structured approach with six core elements (6W) of social memory: participant ("Who"), theme ("What issue"), government initiative ("What strategies"), sentiment ("In what perspective"), time ("When"), and place ("Where") to understand how social memory on Queensland flood between 2011 and 2022 were (re-)constructed by 262 newspapers. We found that early reporting focus (2011-2018) was on immediate disaster relief and flooding impact reports, then shifted toward proactive flood preparation and recovery after major floods in 2019 and 2022. Government and public-sector stakeholders (62%) dominated. Major flood narratives were flood impacts (19.5%) and long-term recovery (15%), with declining focus on donation campaigns from 15% to 3%. There was a policy reporting focus on financial assistance and less attention on risk communication campaigns and ecological sustainability policy, which also received primarily negative sentiments. There were also increasing positive sentiments on regional community recovery. Brisbane consistently dominated media coverage with narratives emphasizing institutional controversies, while regional areas such as Townsville exhibited more diversified and proactive narratives on community driven recovery. The systemic identification of positive memory and negative baggage can assist in more precisely enhancing community resilience against flood. This paper contributes to the generalization of social memory studies in natural disaster management by providing a structured analytical framework that enables systematic comparison of social memories from different newspapers across temporal and spatial scales.

Urban green space (UGS) with multidimensional attributes provides crucial ecosystem services and public health benefits. However, there is no systemic knowledge on how these diverse UGS attributes meet needs with different socio-economic and demographic characteristics. This study conducts a meta-analysis of the existing UGS case studies from the Web of Science database to reveal the knowledge breadth, depth and applicability for future research and practice in UGS. We evaluated how 75 socio-economic and demographic indicators shape 73 UGS indicators across 48 global case studies using a combination of relational analysis, meta-analytical effect and spatiotemporal distribution. The relation analysis reveals significant imbalances of UGS knowledge across attributes (Accessibility, security and amenities) and users' characteristics (e.g., age), the meta-analytical effect size analysis indicates that many associations have not yet received consistent and conclusive empirical support for direct application to UGS planning and design, and the spatiotemporal analysis indicates that the concentration of the sampled studies in China and the United States further constrains the external applicability of the synthesized evidence. These findings recognize the multidimensional nature of UGS and the need for context-sensitive consideration and highlight the urgency of developing a unified assessment framework to improve knowledge discovery and applicability in UGS planning for urban sustainability.

Meeting urban population needs through UGS design is a global concern, yet no consistent framework exists to assess how UGS meets human needs. This study develops a four hierarchal levels (nine-indicator) framework for assessing UGS in meeting the needs of surrounding groups and applies it to the 20 UGSs in Southeast Queensland (SEQ), Australia. The framework categorizes human needs into four levels-prerequisites (accessibility, security, and legibility), basic needs (privacy and sociality), higher-level needs (education, health, and special needs), and highest-level needs (personal identity). It was found that the UGSs in the SEQ region lack sufficient attention to security, legibility, convenience, and education needs, and the design of Anzac Park and five other parks are generally weak against the nine indicators. Additionally, key UGS functions such as privacy, education and identity showed no significant correlation with socio-economic indicators. Our framework can assist in identifying potential problems and provide a whole-of-system basis for future UGS design.

Road networks are the most basic yet significant permanent infrastructure. With the growing population and demands for urbanization, road networks are increasing intertwined with the natural environment and urban cities. Hence there is a need to understand the dynamics of the road networks and their impacts from a socio-ecological development perspective. This article is a thorough review of 35 articles with the aim to understand and review the various elements that may be impacted by the road infrastructure and the methods adopted by researchers in their study of those elements. It is found that there has been extensive work conducted in road networks from a traffic prediction and management perspective, but understanding of the road network impacts were fragmented and highly constrained to case-by-case studies. Understanding from these highlights the need to leverage network modelling methodologies from a socio-ecological perspective for developing more urban sustainable road systems.

Radical transformations of technology development are required to meet the rapidly increasing global water resource challenges. A systemic understanding of the impacts of water technologies on water practices across countries remains limited. This paper aims to develop an understanding of the linkages between water technologies and water practices in the 11 countries where 95% of the world’s water patents were produced. The water technological development was assessed by both the contents (different types of technologies) and the structure (the technology network). The water practices were presented by country-level indicators representing their water demand, water supply, and water management collected from public databases. It was found that there was an extremely uneven distribution with the top 3 countries (China, Korea, Japan) accounting for over 70% of the total patents, and there were slow growth rates and even a decline of water technologies. All countries demonstrated homogeneous technological development focusing on water supply, and their networks had limited brokerage capacity for knowledge diffusion. Australia, China, Canada, France, and Korea had relatively good links between water technologies and practices, whereas the majority of countries demonstrated unbalanced technological structures with a de-linking to water practices. These findings can assist in developing water technologies for improving water practices in future.

Value, technology, and policy are three interactive societal factors affecting the willingness, capacity, and formal rules of human interactions with water. Existing human-water models generally neglect the dynamic and accumulated processes of these factors, failing to explain the societal causes of changes in water practices. Here we developed nine process-based quantitative datasets of Value-Technology-Policy regarding water. They contain 17,003 newspaper articles and 801 public submissions to reflect different water values, 1337 ancient technologies and 40,303 patents for water technologies, and 720 water policy documents at various spatial (national, regional, state, and river basin) and temporal (decades to hundreds of years) scales. A consistent, 4-step content analysis approach was adopted to identify, collect and manually code five key elements (processes) of value, technology and policy: the time (“when”), location (“where”), actor (“who”), theme (“what”), and perspective/tone (“what effects”). Inter-coder reliability tests were conducted to ensure the consistency and validity of the data. These datasets will contribute to more process-oriented understanding of societal factors for improved human-water system modelling in the Anthropocene.

Low-heat expansive cement (LHEC) is an environmentally friendly and low-carbon cementitious material. Compared to ordinary Portland cement (OPC), LHEC reduces CO2 emissions from the cement production process; furthermore, it enhances the service life of the cement by overcoming the problem of OPC’s strength inversion in hot and humid environments. In order to improve the performance of LHEC in a hygrothermal environment, the strength and expansion of LHEC with different gypsum dosages (8–20%) at curing temperatures of 20 °C, 50 °C, and 80 °C were investigated. The corresponding mechanism was investigated using XRD, TGA, SEM, and porosity analyses. The results indicate that there is a ‘critical gypsum dosage’ for strength at 20 °C. The ‘critical dosage’ rises with the curing temperature or an increase in age. Raising the curing temperature has a better effect on the strength of cement with a higher gypsum dosage; it does not have such a positive effect on cement with a low gypsum dosage. The higher the gypsum content, the greater the expansion rate, and the longer the time needed for the expansion to stabilize. The higher the curing temperature, the shorter the time required for stable expansion and the lower the final expansion rate. Increasing the gypsum dosage and maintaining the temperature promote the hydration of slag and the formation of ettringite (AFt), thereby enhancing the microstructure of the cement. AFt decomposition occurs in the case of a low gypsum dosage and high curing temperature. According to the above results, it is inferred that the strength and expansion performance of LHEC in a hygrothermal environment can be improved by appropriately increasing its gypsum dosage. This finding offers valuable insights for the improvement of LHEC and its application in hygrothermal conditions.

With the increasing complexity of societal and environmental problems in the Anthropocene, the use of both classification-based approaches, which provide in-depth understanding within disciplinary boundaries, and citation-based approaches, which provide interdisciplinary research, has been encouraged. However, there are limited comparisons of the knowledge networks produced between these two approaches, which compromises our capacity to manage technological development. This paper aims to investigate the similarities and differences of river technology networks produced using classification-based and citation-based approaches. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) database from 1863 to 2020 was used as the data source. River technology systems contained three interactive subsystems: water demand, water supply, and water management, and the structure was measured using network-based metrics. It was found that river technology systems constructed using the classification-based and the citation-based approaches developed similarly in terms of their temporal, spatial, and compositional features. The structural differences were attributed to the addition of an external system that draws upon interdisciplinary knowledge beyond water resources. Both approaches can be used for guiding technology management, with the classification-based approach being more effective for understanding the content of innovations and the citation-based approach being more effective in gathering information beyond the water resource discipline. Technologies from more diverse disciplines should be encouraged to address increasingly complex water challenges.

Radical transformations of knowledge development are required to address the sustainability issues in the Anthropocene. This study developed a framework to understand the internal structures of knowledge development with two dimensions: degree of multidisciplinarity and degree of issue connectivity. Examining the knowledge development in 72 river basins globally from 1962 to 2017 using the Web of Science (WoS) dataset, it was found that the river basin knowledge systems were characterized by increasingly interconnected issues addressed by limited disciplines. Evaluating these structural characteristics against six impact indicators of society and policy, over 90 % of rivers were found to have knowledge structures that were strongly linked to society impacts, whereas only 57 % were linked to that of policy. Optimization analysis further found that about 35 % of the rivers studied mostly in Asia, Africa, and South America were prone to fragmented knowledge structures that had limited capacities to effectively address the issues with negative environmental impacts and resource depletion. Improving multidisciplinary research is the key to transforming the current knowledge structure to support more sustainable river basin development.

As an environmentally friendly cement material in green buildings, due to its low contribution to air pollution and its substantial use of solid waste, supersulfated cement (SSC) has been extensively studied. However, the low early strength of sustainably utilized SSC needs to be addressed. In order to use SSC to achieve great reductions in energy consumption during industrial production, the effects of triethanolamine (TEA), diethanolisopropanolamine (DEIPA) and triisopropanolamine (TIPA) (with dosages ranging from 0.02% to 0.08%) on the strength and hydration of SSC were studied, and the underlying mechanism was analyzed by TGA, XRD and SEM. The results show that TEA and DEIPA significantly improve the 3-day and 28-day strength of SSC. The former is better at low dosages, while the latter is more suitable for high dosages. TIPA also enhances the 3-day strength of SSC, but it is not as good as the other two alkanolamines. The chelation of alkanolamine with Al3+ ions plays an important role in the strength development of SSC, which accelerates the decomposition of slag and the formation of ettringite. In summary, adding alkanolamines to low-carbon cement systems with a high proportion of industrial by-products such as SSC is a potential and effective solution. In addition, alkanolamines can be used as a strength promoter for most low-carbon blends, which fully utilize solid waste.

Rivers are cradles of human civilisations and continual innovations in water technologies are the key to sustainable human development. Yet, limited research has explored the interactive dynamics among different technologies, hindering our ability to effectively manage technological transition. This paper presents a framework that conceptualizes water technology as a complex adaptive system containing three interrelated sub-systems: water demand, water supply, and water management. The interactions among these sub-systems were measured using three network-based metrics: intensity, brokerage, and efficiency. Patents registered in the World Intellectual Property Organization from 1863 to 2020 were used as the data source. It was found that 40,304 patents from 44 countries were registered, with 40% of them belonging to the water management sub-system, followed by water supply (35%), and water demand (25%). Technological development in the three sub-systems presented linear growth over the past 160 years, focusing on water treatment, hydroelectric power, hydraulic engineering and water monitoring. The water-demand sub-system was identified as the structural “bottleneck” with the highest brokerage value, which was considered crucial for knowledge transfer between the other two sub-systems. Overall, the water technology system is characterized by slow development, skewed spatial coverage, categorical homogeneity, and structural imbalances, limiting our ability to address the escalating global water threats.

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Human activities through changes in land and water use have led to increase in provision ecosystem services (ESs) but decrease in some regulating, supporting, and cultural services in the past thousands of years. The impact of land and water use on different types of ESs has been extensively studied, but it has not been directly linked to its societal drivers, thus failed to explain the societal root cause of ES degradation. This paper aims to examine the impacts of 3 generic societal drivers: societal value, institutional governance, and science and technology development on the evolution of ESs in the Heihe River Basin, China since 2000 years ago. Water provision, food provision, groundwater maintenance, climate regulation, and environmental flow maintenance were examined as the major ESs. Content analysis method was used to track the change of the 3 societal drivers from various textual documents. It was found that there were strong trade-off relationships between food provision and groundwater maintenance in midstream and the environmental flow maintenance services in downstream. The slow-changing and independently developed societal drivers failed to adaptively respond to the increasing food provision demands while addressing the significant decrease in groundwater and environmental flows. It is concluded that rational water (re)allocation and use are the prerequisites of balanced development of different categories of ESs and linking societal development to the benefits humans obtain from ecosystems is the prerequisite for sustainable ES management.

This study aims to report the early strength effect and hydration mechanisms of limestone-calcined clay cement (LC3) with sodium carbonate, sodium sulfate and sodium chloride. The experimental results show that it is feasible to add three kinds of insoluble inorganic salts to improve the early strength of LC3 through different promotion methods. In comparison to sodium sulfate, the strengthening effects of sodium carbonate and sodium chloride on early strength of LC3 are more significant. The hydration heat evolution, mercury intrusion porosity and a set of tests for microstructural characterization (XRD, FTIR and SEM) were utilized to better understand the enhancement mechanism of inorganic salts in LC3 system. The mechanism by which sodium carbonate promotes the early strength of LC3 is mainly the strengthening of the aluminate reaction and pozzolanic reaction of metakaolin. The mechanism by which sodium sulfate promotes the early strength of LC3 is mainly the additional ettringite. The mechanism by which sodium chloride promotes the early strength of LC3 is mainly the strengthening of the silicate reaction and the generation of Friedel's salt by alumina from tricalcium aluminate and metakaolin.

Water reallocation decision-making is a challenge faced by most river basins around the world. In this study, a system thinking framework was developed to structurally unfold the complex interactions of water reallocations with societal, economic and ecological subsystems in the Heihe River Basin in China. The results indicate that ecological degradations appeared much later than economic development. Slow-changing societal values and limited considerations of technological development and government regulations towards environmental protection contributed to the weak and untimely responses of water reallocations to ecological degradation. This framework can assist in strategic water reallocation decision-making in river basins.

采用矿渣制备了超硫酸盐水泥,研究了硫酸亚铁和硝酸钙的掺量和掺加方式对超硫酸盐水泥3d、7d、28 d和90 d抗压、抗折强度的影响.结果表明:单掺适量硫酸亚铁时,超硫酸盐水泥各龄期的抗压、抗折强度均有所提高,但掺量过大(>0.5％)时对早期(3 d)抗压、抗折强度不利;单掺硝酸钙时,超硫酸盐水泥各龄期的抗压、抗折强度均有所降低;复掺硫酸亚铁和硝酸钙时,超硫酸盐水泥各龄期的抗压、抗折强度较未掺和单掺时均有明显提高,其中,复掺1.5％硫酸亚铁和2.0％硝酸钙对强度的提高效果最好.

Flooding has become one of the most dangerous and expensive disasters due to urbanization and climate change. Tools for assessing flood impact are required to support the shift of flood mitigation management from post-disaster recovery and reconstruction to community-driven pre-disaster warning and preparation. This study aims to develop an integrated approach to spatially assess the economic and social losses and ecological gain and identify the geographical factors of locations with high impacts of floods in Brisbane using the datasets collected from both the 2011 and 2022 flood events. Water depth, inundated area, land cover, ecosystem service value, mortality, and morbidity were considered to assess flood impacts. It is found that downstream (above 23,500 m from the upper stream) riverside communities (within 800 m of the river) with low altitudes (below 15 m) are more likely to experience significant flood damage. Flood impacts have bell-shaped developments with elevation and direct distance to the upstream river source and an exponential decline with distances to the river. These findings have implications for formulating future urban land use and community-tailored mitigation strategies, particularly for flood warning and preparation.

Urbanization has become an important player in the global carbon cycle, and land use change is the second largest source of carbon emissions. However, despite great advances in remote sensing and satellite imagery, there is no reliable estimate of the impact of land use change on changes in land carbon stock in global cities. This paper quantified the impact of land use change on land carbon flux in the world’s 100 largest cities by using annual land cover data based on LandSat 8 images and land carbon stock parameters provided by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It was found that significant urban expansion could be observed in 83 cities, while 29 cities showed a deforestation trend, and croplands in 42 cities have shrunk. Carbon stock reduced by more than 112 million tons in the 100 selected cities from 2013 to 2022 due to land cover change. A total of 39 cities showed significant negative trends in land carbon stock that were mainly caused by urban sprawl and shrinkage in forest or cropland, among which Kolkata, Chongqing, Seoul, Guangzhou, and Hefei showed the greatest decline. Because of the growth of forest and cropland, or reduction in barren land and grassland, 28 cities showed clear positive trends in land carbon stock. In order to increase urban land carbon stock, the urban planning of most cities should focus on the protection of forests or afforestation that replace barren land or grassland and should avoid mindless urban expansion.

Using publications in the Web of Science database (WoS), this study investigates the research collaboration on the top 95 most researched global river basins since 1900. The links of both the disciplines involved and the management issues studied between the biophysical, economic, societal, climatic and governance sub-systems of these river basins were examined. We found that research collaborations were dominated within the biophysical sub-system (65.3%) since the knowledge predevelopment period (1900-1983), with continuous increases (by 18.5%) during the rapid development (1984-2000) and the stabilisation (12.9% increase) (2001-2017). However, research collaborations related to the societal sub-system remained marginalised (varied at about 1%), while those related to the governance sub-system expanded in issues studied (32.8%) but were not supported by the core governance disciplines (3.4%). The key findings explained why global river basins are degraded from the perspective of knowledge development and they can assist the strategic planning and management of scientific research for improving governance capacity in modifying the relationship between human and nature on river basins in the Anthropocene. Tackling challenges in the Anthropocene requires transformation of the current pattern of knowledge development, a revolution in the governance of science.