Notes On Academic Research

“Deciphering the spatial structure of China’s megacity region: A new bay area
—The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in the making”
E. Hui, Xun Li, Tingting Chen, Wei Lang
Cities Volume 105, October 2020

In 2015, the China State Council in its 13th Five-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development strategically initiated the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, with emphasis on strengthening its role in economic development and its powerful synergy with the all-important The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the country and globally. The Greater Bay Area is a unique mega city region situated at the Pearl River Delta, covering the 11 [9 mainland cities +2 special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau)] cities. However, few studies examined the bay area under a unique institutional and economic context. This study aims to examine regional integration and spatial connection that affect the growth and success of the megacity region using network analysis. Particularly, it analyzed the centrality of human movements, traffic flow and railway network through visualization of the results from Tencent (QQ) Location Big Data, railway service and census data. The study reveals that the vital contributor to the formation and success of the Greater Bay Area is its rapid growth of transport infrastructure and capacities, particularly high-speed railway, promoting free flowing of the key factors. Strong spatial and transport connection critically harness regional integration and boosting viable development of the Greater Bay Area. Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong has shaped a triangle structure. The findings provide planning recommendation and policy implications for city planners and policy makers for regional governance and cooperation in mainland China, Hong Kong and worldwide. From the Abastract

“The second-generation real-time ecological environment prediction system for the
Guangdong–Hong Kong–Marco Greater Bay Area: Model setup, validation, improvements,
and online visualization”
L. Luo, Zhao Meng, Weiwei Ma, Jingwen Huang, Youchang Zheng, Yang Feng,
Yineng Li, Yonglin Liu, Yuanguang Huang, Yuhang Zhu

Frontiers in Marine Science (2023)

With the rapidly growing population and socioeconomic development of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Marco Greater Bay Area of China, inputs of diverse contaminants have rapidly increased. This poses threats to the water quality of the Pearl River Estuary (PRE) and adjacent seas. To provide valuable information to assist the governors, stakeholders, and decision-makers in tracking changes in environmental conditions, daily nowcasts and two-day forecasts from the ecological prediction system, namely the Coupled Great Bay Ecological Environmental Prediction System (CGEEPS), has been setup. These forecast systems have been built on the Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere–Wave–Sediment Transport modelling system. This comprises an atmospheric Weather Research Forecasting module and an oceanic Regional Ocean Modelling System module. Daily real-time nowcasts and 2-day forecasts of temperature, salinity, NO2 + NO3, chlorophyll, and pH are continuously available. Visualizations of the forecasts are available on a local website (http://www.gbaycarbontest.xyz:8008/). This paper describes the setup of the environmental forecasting system, evaluates model hindcast simulations from 2014 to 2018, and investigates downscaling and two-way coupling with the regional atmospheric model. The results shown that though CGEEPS lacks accuracy in predicting the absolute value for biological and biogeochemical environmental variables. It is quite informative to predict the spatio-temporal variability of ecological environmental changes associated with extreme weather events. Our study will benefit of developing real-time marine biogeochemical and ecosystem forecast tool for oceanic regions heavily impact by extreme weathers. From the Abstract