Earthquakes occur frequently in rural areas of Sichuan, China, causing huge damage and high mortality. The built environment plays a significant role in providing residents with safe and resilient settlements in such areas. There is yet little research on how rural families in developing countries cope with geological disasters like earthquakes, and how built environmental factors would influence their resettlement choices which would directly affect their quality of life afterward. Urban planning activities should be accompanied by these insights to design and create human-centric resettlements accordingly. In this study, the resettlement choices after three major earthquakes in Sichuan were studied for this reason. Random sampling and face-to-face questionnaire surveys were combined with factor analysis and binary logistic regression to understand the resettlement modes desired by the residents and the influencing factors. The results show that residents who have lived in their current places long and whose houses were not built recently are more likely to choose the in-situ resettlement. Accessibility to employment and public services has a significant impact on residents' choice of in-situ resettlement or reallocated resettlement, and so does the previous resettlement experience. The research results can provide useful suggestions for Chinese rural area post-earthquake resettlement planning following a human-centric approach with empirical data.@en

The global climate change has resulted in huge flood damages, which seriously hinders the sustainable development of rural economy and society and causes famers’ livelihood problems. In flood-prone areas, it is imperative to actively study short and long-term strategies and solve farmers’ livelihood problems accordingly. Following the sustainable development analysis framework proposed by the Department for International Development (DFID), this study collects empirical data of 360 rural households in six sample villages in the Jialing River Basin of Sichuan Province, China through a village-to-household field questionnaire and applies the Multinominal Logit Model (MNL) to explore the influence of farmer households’ capital on livelihood strategy choice. Research results show that: (1) In human capital category, the education level of the household head has a significant positive impact on the livelihood strategies of farmers’ families; (2) In physical capital category, farmer households with larger space have more funds to choose among flood adaptation strategies; (3) In natural capital category, house location and the sale of family property for cash have the greatest negative impact on farmers’ livelihood strategies; (4) Rural households with more credit opportunities in financial capital are more willing to obtain emergency relief funds; (5) Farmers’ families helped by the village for a long time will probably not choose to move to avoid floods, but are more likely to choose buying flood insurance. This study provides an empirical reference for effective short and long term prevention and mitigation strategies design and application in rural in flood-prone areas@en

The rapid urbanization in China urges scholars to investigate the impacts of built environment on the level of travel satisfaction of rural residents to improve their quality of life and make planning exercises more human-centric. This study samples six villages out of the 25 top rural areas in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, as the research object and constructs a structural equation model to explore the direct and indirect impacts of the built environment on daily travel satisfaction of rural residents. The research finds that building density (0.609), road density (0.569), the number of accessible markets (0.314), and private car ownership (0.02) have significant positive impacts on travel satisfaction. Public transport (−0.063) has a direct negative impact on travel satisfaction. Consequently, in order to further improve travel satisfaction, construction departments and rural planners should improve the building and road densities of new rural areas and increase the number of accessible markets. The convenience of rural public transport services also needs improvement.@en

The rural three-tier healthcare system is an essential part of the Chinese healthcare service system. To ensure rural residents’ equal access to such healthcare services, it is necessary to examine the current status of the healthcare system in rural China and formulate corresponding improvement suggestions. This study therefore collects the data from the China Health Statistics Yearbook, the China Health Yearbook and the China Statistical Yearbook between the years 2004 and 2021 to calculate the Gini coefficient (G), health resource density index (HRDI) and Theil index (T) first, and then perform the Mann–Kendall test afterwards to evaluate the equity of healthcare resource allocation comprehensively. This series of analysis helps in drawing the following conclusions: (1) county and county-level city medical and health institutions (CMHIs) show a higher development trend in comparison with township hospitals (THs) and village clinics (VCs); (2) VCs have higher institutional fairness, while for beds and personnel, CMHIs and THs are more fairly positioned; (3) more specifically for CMHIs and THs, personnel allocation is more fair than beds and institution allocations; (4) the density of healthcare resources in the eastern and central regions is higher than that in the western part, while the intra-regional distribution of beds and personnel in the west and central regions is better than that in the eastern region; (5) intra-regional differences are more significant than inter-regional differences and the fairness according to population distribution is higher than that of geographical area allocation. The results of this study provide theoretical basis for further optimizing the allocation of healthcare resources and improving the fairness of healthcare resources allocation from a macro perspective.

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Residents’ satisfaction with post-disaster reconstruction in earthquake-stricken areas directly affects their quality of life, which cannot be ignored in post-disaster reconstruction. More than 10 years after the Wenchuan earthquake, we took ten randomly selected villages in the five areas hardest-hit by the Wenchuan earthquake as research objects and obtained 483 valid completed questionnaires. The villagers were randomly sampled and descriptive statistical analysis, factor analysis, and ordered logistic regression were used to explore the factors and relationships influencing villagers’ satisfaction with post-disaster reconstruction in Wenchuan earthquake-stricken areas. The results show that: 1) the more rural residents know about the post-disaster reconstruction, the greater their level of satisfaction; 2) the more the annual income of families increases after resettlement, the greater the satisfaction of rural residents with the post-disaster reconstruction; 3) six public factors, namely the village committee acts as, housing construction quality, public service, policy of benefiting farmers, cultural environment, and hardware environment, all significantly positively affect residents’ overall satisfaction with post-earthquake reconstruction. This study thus enriches the theory of residents’ satisfaction studies and the practice of post-earthquake reconstruction.@en

Media has paid more attention recently on environmental issues caused by construction companies which imposes public opinion pressure on construction companies and could potentially impact their decision-making processes for green innovations. However, research on the relationship between public opinions pressure and construction company green innovation behavior is still limited. To understand how such public opinions pressure can impact construction companies' green transition and formulate advice accordingly, it is necessary to use empirical data to find the correlations. Therefore, this research has gathered questionnaire data of the construction companies in Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle of China to study the influencing mechanism of environmental public opinion pressure on enterprise green innovation behavior, analyzes the realization path of leaders' environmental intention as a mediating variable in the impact of environmental public opinion pressure on enterprise green innovation behavior, and reveals the role boundary of environmental regulation as a moderating variable in the impact of environmental public opinion pressure on enterprise green innovation behavior. The results show that environmental public opinion pressure has a significant positive impact on enterprise green innovation behavior. More specifically, enterprise green innovation behavior is affected by leaders' environmental intention and the latter plays a partial mediating role between environmental public opinion pressure and enterprise green innovation behavior. Environmental regulation also enhances the sensitivity of companies to environmental public opinion pressure, and therefore can significantly strengthen the relationship between environmental public opinion pressure and enterprise green innovation behavior. Further research find that, compared with incentive-based environmental regulations, mandatory environmental regulations make companies more sensitive to environmental public opinion pressure and has a more significant positive moderating effect. The research conclusions could be used to provide theoretical reference with empirical data for accelerating the green innovation transformation and promoting the high-quality development in the construction industry.@en