International audienceDisaster loss estimates are helpful for managing post-disaster reconstruction and for designing disaster-risk mitigation strategies. However, most of these estimates in China merely consider direct losses, and only a few include indirect economic losses. As the most destructive earthquake since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Wenchuan Earthquake that occurred in 2008 resulted in direct economic damages reached Chinese Yuan (CNY) 845 billion (US $124 billion). The aim of the study was to estimate indirect economic losses caused by the Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan Province through the Adaptive Regional Input-Output (ARIO) model, which can reflect disaster-related changes in production capacity, ripple effects within the economic system, and adaptive behaviors of economic actors. The results showed that indirect economic losses in the production and housing sectors were estimated at 40% of the direct economic losses, i.e., approximately CNY 300 billion; moreover, the model predicted an 8-year reconstruction period. Several factors contributed to these losses, including significant damages to key sectors, financial constraints on reconstruction, post-earthquake investment instability, and limits in reconstruction capacity. Active government support policies post-earthquake are a useful strategy to mitigate the adverse economic impact of an earthquake in developing countries

The year 2015 is the 25th annum of the international disaster and risk reduction proposed by the United Nations. Disaster risk reduction (DRR) has achieved significant progress worldwide. The goals of disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, and sustainable development have become the joint responsibility of all countries in their economic, societal, cultural, political, and ecological construction activities. In the past 25 years, UNISDR together with national governments, scientific community, NGOs, entrepreneur groups, media and various relevant regional organizations is gaining effective results in alleviating human being's casualties, property losses, and damages to resources and environment caused by natural hazards on the world and is earning a great reputation at every stratum of society as well. Nevertheless, data released by related UN organizations indicate that natural disaster and disaster risk are still on the rise globally. Some nations and regions are still extremely vulnerable to large-scale disasters, although significant progress has been made in DRR actions. Natural disaster risk reduction is still a long haul ahead. FoundationsThe global hot spots project jointly finished by the World Bank and Columbia University (the USA) is the first ever cartography of major natural disaster risks at the global scale (Dilley et al. 2005). The UNISDR Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) inspired this Atlas (UN-ISDR 2009, 2011 All faculties and students of BNU on the disaster risk science and the international experts who participated in the IHDP/Future Earth-Integrated Risk Governance and "111 Project", as well as all the personnel involved in these two projects, throughout ten years of preparation, planning, and action, were organized to compile this atlas, aiming to reflect the spatial patterns of the main natural disaster risk all around the world. This atlas provides scientific evidence for taking effective measures of world natural disaster risk reduction by demonstrating the spatial variation from the following three spatial scales for the main natural disaster risk on the world: the grid unit (1°× 1°, 0.75°× 0.75°, 0.5°× 0.5°, 0.25°× 0.25°, 0.1°× 0.1°or 1 km × 1 km), the comparable geographic unit (about 448,334 km 2 per unit), and the national or regional unit (245 nations and regions). International Scientific and Technological CooperationClose cooperation with worldwide scientific institutions lays the scientific foundation of this Atlas. Scientific BasisThe World Atlas of Natural Disaster Risk attempts to reveal the spatial pattern of the risks of natural disaster which are mainly caused by physical hazards in the world with multiple perspectives of natural environment, exposure, disaster loss, and disaster risk with the framework of Regional Disaster System Theory (Shi 1991(Shi , 1996(Shi , 2002(Shi , 2005(Shi , 2009. It emphasizes the spatial-temporal pattern of worldwide natural disasters from the perspective of individual disasters and integrated disasters, in...

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Polarimetric imaging has proved its value in medical diagnostics, bionics, remote sensing, astronomy, and in many other wide fields. Pixel-level solid monolithically integrated polarimetric imaging photo-detectors are the trend for infrared polarimetric imaging devices. For better polarimetric imaging performance the high polarization discriminating detectors are very much critical. Here we demonstrate the high infrared light polarization resolving capabilities of a quantum well (QW) detector in hybrid structure of single QW and plasmonic micro-cavity that uses QW as an active structure in the near field regime of plasmonic effect enhanced cavity, in which the photoelectric conversion in such a plasmonic micro-cavity has been realized. The detector's extinction ratio reaches 65 at the wavelength of 14.7 μm, about 6 times enhanced in such a type of pixel-level polarization long wave infrared photodetectors. The enhancement mechanism is attributed to artificial plasmonic modulation on optical propagation and distribution in the plasmonic micro-cavities.

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Abstract:With the growing demand for energy and the depletion of conventional crude oil, heavy oil in huge reserve has attracted extensive attention. However, heavy oil cannot be directly refined by existing processes unless they are upgraded due to its complex composition and high concentration of heteroatoms (N, S, Ni, V, etc.). Of the variety of techniques for heavy oil upgrading, supercritical water (SCW) is gaining popularity because of its excellent ability to convert heavy oil into valued, clean light oil by the suppression of coke formation and the removal of heteroatoms. Based on the current status of this research around the world, heavy oil upgrading in SCW is summarized from three aspects: Transformation of hydrocarbons, suppression of coke, and removal of heteroatoms. In this work, the challenge and future development of the orientation of upgrading heavy oil in SCW are pointed out.

The observed decline of spring dust storms in Northeast Asia since the 1950s has been attributed to surface wind stilling. However, spring vegetation growth could also restrain dust storms through accumulating aboveground biomass and increasing surface roughness. To investigate the impacts of vegetation spring growth on dust storms, we examine the relationships between recorded spring dust storm outbreaks and satellite-derived vegetation green-up date in Inner Mongolia, Northern China from 1982 to 2008. We find a significant dampening effect of advanced vegetation growth on spring dust storms (r = 0.49, p = 0.01), with a one-day earlier green-up date corresponding to a decrease in annual spring dust storm outbreaks by 3%. Moreover, the higher correlation (r = 0.55, p < 0.01) between green-up date and dust storm outbreak ratio (the ratio of dust storm outbreaks to times of strong wind events) indicates that such effect is independent of changes in surface wind. Spatially, a negative correlation is detected between areas with advanced green-up dates and regional annual spring dust storms (r = −0.49, p = 0.01). This new insight is valuable for understanding dust storms dynamics under the changing climate. Our findings suggest that dust storms in Inner Mongolia will be further mitigated by the projected earlier vegetation green-up in the warming world.