Perception of sponge city for achieving circularity goal and hedge against climate change: a study on Weibo

Abstract

Purpose Global climate change speeds up ice melting and increases flooding incidents. China launched a sponge city policy as a holistic nature-based solution combined with urban planning and development to address flooding due to climate change. Using Weibo analytics, this paper aims to study public perceptions of sponge city. Design/methodology/approach This study collected 53,586 sponge city contents from Sina Weibo via Python. Various artificial intelligence tools, such as CX Data Science of Simply Sentiment, KH Coder and Tableau, were applied in the study. Findings 76.8% of public opinion on sponge city were positive, confirming its positive contribution to flooding management and city branding. 17 out of 31 pilot sponge cities recorded the largest number of sponge cities related posts. Other cities with more Weibo posts suffered from rainwater and flooding hazards, such as Xi'an and Zhengzhou. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the public perception of sponge city in Sina Weibo.

Dynamic information spillover between Chinese carbon and stock markets under extreme weather shocks

“…In addition to the differences in market liquidity, investors' attention to different markets can be one of the important reasons for the above conclusions. As one of the practical tools to reduce climate risks, the frequent occurrence of extreme weather events can draw investors' attention to the carbon market (Choi et al, 2020;Zeng et al, 2023). This type of attention behavior may affect investors' trading decisions (Goetzmann et al, 2015) and amplify the trading volume of the carbon market, which will lead to a greater spillover of carbon price fluctuations in the low-polluting sector with less liquid under extreme risk conditions.…”

“…The complex relationship between time series caused by exogenous events (Ren et al, 2022) such as extreme weather events may be the main reason for the inconsistent conclusions in the above literature. With the severity of global warming and the frequent occurrence of extreme weather events, such as floods, extreme drought, and heat waves, climate risks have garnered attention from government and people (Zeng et al, 2023), and becoming one of the important risk sources driving financial markets (Venturini, 2022). The academic literature investigating the impact of climate risks on stock price behavior is extensive (Anttila-Hughes, 2016;Bourdeau-Brien & Kryzanowski, 2017;Lanfear et al, 2019;Choi et al, 2020;Diaz-Rainey et al, 2021), and some studies have begun to focus on the influence of climate risks on carbon prices (Batten et al, 2021;Shi et al, 2023).…”

Transitioning to low-carbon agriculture: the non-linear role of digital inclusive finance in China’s agricultural carbon emissions

“…T he continuous rise in global average temperature leads to the problems of increased extreme weather phenomena, frequent agricultural disasters, and reduced biodiversity (Kumar et al, 2021;Muluneh, 2021;Shivanna, 2022), while flood disasters caused by melting of ice sheets threaten the survival and development of human beings themselves (Zeng et al, 2023), and these problems mainly stem from greenhouse gas emissions . Against this backdrop, many countries have made low-carbon development an important goal (Wei et al, 2019).…”