The Sage Handbook of China and the Environment

Christopher Coggins, Yifei Li

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781529623239
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781036202521
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Sage Handbook of China and the Environment offers a comprehensive exploration of China?s environment through a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary lens. This volume presents China?s environment as a series of interconnected temporal and spatial processes involving human agency and more-than-human dynamics. Contributions from leading scholars in social science, environmental science, and humanities focus on long-term environmental change, shifts in environmental perception, and the dynamic adaptations that have shaped China as both a nation and a mosaic of distinctive socio-ecological networks.

The handbook delves into the processes of human-environment relations that have shaped contemporary landscapes, ecosystems, and livelihoods within China?s territorial boundaries, as well as global industrial and commercial processes affecting climate change and geopolitics worldwide. Each section of the book includes chapters that summarize key contributions to specific fields of environmental research, assess prevailing paradigms, and chart a course for future work, including calls for activist research that encourages collaborative engagement with the dynamic political, economic, ecological, and cultural processes shaping China?s environment and policy.

Organized into four main sections, the handbook covers the long-term ecological transformation of China, biodiversity conservation and the social construction of nature, pressing environmental concerns in urbanizing China, and China?s role in global sustainability. It provides a nuanced understanding of China?s environmental challenges and achievements, emphasizing the need for multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches to address the complexities of China?s environment.

The Sage Handbook of China and the Environment is an essential resource for scholars, practitioners, and students seeking to understand the intricate processes shaping China?s environment and its global impact.

Part 1: Past as Prelude: The Long Journey Toward Understanding China?s Long-term Ecological Transformation
Part 2: Biodiversity and Wild Landscapes: Conservation and the Social Construction of Nature in Contemporary China
Part 3: Pressing Environmental Concerns in Urbanizing China
Part 4: Global China, the Biosphere, and Planetary Sustainability

 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustration List
• Notes on Editors and Contributors
• Introduction: China’s Ecological Transformation— A Relational Approach
• A Brief Geographic Sketch of China at the Dawn of the Third Millennium: Mountains, Rivers, Basins, Plains, and Plateaus
• 1 How Humans Have Transformed China’s Biosphere
• 2 Forests in Imperial China
• 3 Deep Waters: Environmental Histories of China’s Rivers and Hydrological Resources
• 4 Farming With the Elements: Agronomy and Ecological Wisdom in Early China
• 5 Nature Through the Cartographer’s Eye: Depictions of Natural Elements in Ancient Chinese Maps1
• 6 Fengshui, Ecology, and the Fate of China’s Subtropical Broadleaf Evergreen Forest Biome
• 7 Shifting Isohyet, Human Migrations, and Inter-Asian Geographies of China: Climate Refugees and Empire Builders in the 1200s
• 8 Development, Environment, and Ecosystem Resilience: Water and Food in the People’s Republic of China1
• 9 Animal Science, Protection, and Conservation in Republican China, 1911–1949
• 10 Wildlife in the Crossfire: The Legal and Ethical Challenges of Animal Protection in China
• 11 Global China and the Wildlife Trade: Impacts on Biodiversity, Marine Ecosystems, and Racialized Public Health Risks
• 12 The Resilience and Complexity of Tibetan Pastoralism: Language, Livestock, and Ritual
• Acknowledgements
• 13 Bureaucracy, Vulnerability, and Environmental Research
• Acknowledgements
• 14 One Size Does Not Fit All: Variable Community Interactions With Protected Areas in China and Implications for Conservation Management
• Acknowledgements
• 15 Evidence-Based Conservation Management in China: Understanding Decision-Making for the Yangtze Finless Porpoise, a Critically Endangered Chinese Cetacean
• 16 Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in China’s Environmental Governance
• 17 Digital Mediation of Environmental Governance Through Gamification of Sustainability Priorities: The Case of Ant Forest in China
• Acknowledgements
• 18 China’s Changing Ecocinema
• 19 Teaching Digital Landscapes: Incorporating Virtual Reality to Chinese Environmental Learning
• 20 Place-Based Earth and Environmental Education: Lessons From Southern China and the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands
• 21 Air Pollution Concerns: Spatial and Temporal Variability and Drivers
• 22 Co-Controlling Air Pollution and Greenhouse Gases: Greening Transportation in China
• 23 Reactive Authoritarianism: Understanding the Caprices of Chinese Environmental Governance
• 24 Sino-US Hyper-Competition in the Climate Crisis Era: The Case of Critical Minerals
• 25 Security, Climate Change, and the Politics of Vulnerability in China
• 26 China’s Climate Change Governance: Authoritarianism or Alternative to Save the World?
• 27 Chinese ESG and Green Finance in the Belt and Road Initiative
• 28 Eating the Quick and the Dead: On Feeding China’s Cities
• 29 Socio-Ecological Engineering in the Chinese Century
• Index