Political ecology is an interdisciplinary theoretical paradigm that emerged in the 1970s‒1980s, aiming to analyze power relations in environmental issues and uncover the underlying injustices and inequalities. This paper systematically elucidates the theoretical connotation of political ecology and constructs its theoretical profile through three dimensions: ideological origins, theoretical purports, and value orientation. The escalating environmental crisis has exposed the theoretical and practical limitations of traditional "human-excluded" ecology, giving rise to "human-included" or "political" ecology. The critiques of Malthusian population theory by Marx and Engels played a significant role in the formation of political ecology. Political ecology can also be regarded as an "expanded" ecology and a "specialized" political economy. Theoretically, political ecology focuses on power dynamics in environmental issues, employs cross-scale analytical methods, emphasizes practice-oriented case studies, and engages with discourse analysis or deconstruction of dominant narratives In terms of value orientation, political ecology fundamentally seeks to expose injustices and inequalities in environmental problems. From the perspective of its intellectual character, political ecology combines the deconstructive function of an "axe" with the constructive potential of a "seed", striving to advance fairness, justice, and sustainable development in environmental governance.

Urban infrastructure serves as a crucial vehicle for understanding urban development and spatial transformation and is a central focus of urban political ecology research. However, the complex socio-natural dialectics and sociopolitical processes underlying these infrastructures have received limited attention within the Chinese academic context. This article focuses on urban hydraulic infrastructure, employing a qualitative systematic review and bibliometric analysis to examine 157 English-language articles indexed in the Web of Science database from 1987 to 2024. The findings reveal that international research on urban political ecology has evolved along multiple pathways, primarily encompassing political-economic analysis from a neo-Marxist perspective, micro-political analysis from a post-structuralist perspective, and everyday practice analysis from a post-humanist perspective. Within these analytical frameworks, scholars have explored pressing issues such as the commodification, modernization, and re-naturalization of hydraulic infrastructure, uncovering the complex power dynamics and "informal" governance practices embedded within these processes. These studies also critically examine how capitalism shapes and reinforces unequal access to water-related ecological services and disparities in urban living experiences. The ontological and analytical frameworks developed in international urban political ecology literature offer significant value for understanding the implementation and spatial production processes of hydraulic infrastructure amid the Chinese urbanization. Furthermore, the rich experiences in China—particularly in terms of state-capital relations, state-society interactions, and socio-natural dynamics—hold great potential for advancing and enriching existing theories of urban political ecology.

Political ecology, with its critical focus on uncovering the embedded social, economic, and political power structures underpinning environmental issues, has emerged as a key interdisciplinary field garnering growing attention from the international academic community. This article offers a comprehensive examination of the development of the global political ecology academic community by analyzing published literature, transnational research networks, university institutions, NGOs, and the digital presence of individual scholars. It identifies and interprets the structural characteristics, developmental trajectories, and future prospects of this academic network.The study finds that political ecology has been heavily influenced by feminism and post-structuralism, resulting in a critically oriented research paradigm. The political ecology community is marked by a high degree of interdisciplinarity, a decentralized and networked organizational form, and a commitment to digitalization and open access scholarship. Furthermore, knowledge production within the field is characterized by a globalization of environmental concerns and a localization of empirical case studies. The rising prominence of Global South perspectives and a strong orientation toward praxis and transformative social engagement are also salient features of current research.However, the article also highlights several ongoing challenges, including increasing theoretical fragmentation and persistent inequalities in knowledge production between the Global North and South. At the same time, the evolving geopolitical landscape, rapid advancements in digital technology, and the escalating urgency of global environmental crises—particularly climate change—present significant opportunities for reinvigorating and expanding the scope and impact of political ecology.

Political ecology emerged in the 1970s and has evolved in response to the intensifying global ecological crisis. Over the past five decades, it has become a vital theoretical framework and practical tool for understanding and addressing global environmental challenges. Unlike the more mainstream Anglophone tradition, German political ecology has developed along a distinct intellectual trajectory shaped by different theoretical traditions, social contexts, and modes of public engagement. These factors have led to unique methodological approaches, analytical perspectives, and research agendas. This paper reviews key literature in German-language political ecology, explores its distinctive contributions to the broader field of political ecology, and highlights existing limitations, aiming to offer new theoretical insights for future research.

Since its publication at the end of 1960s, Hardin's theory of "The Tragedy of the Commons" has solicited a lot of criticisms. Some scholars pinpoint that a lot of indigenous people hold their traditions and practices to respond to the overuse of natural resources. In recent years, discussion on the concept of "commoning" has emerged in political ecology, as scholars expand the meaning of "commoning" from a narrow framework of resource management to the broader issue of exploring an anti-capitalist space. As a word, "commoning" emphasizes the process of "value struggle", in which "common value" transcends commodity value. However, some western scholars lay hope on the community, a third way between state and market, as a site of "commoning", but pay little attention to state-led practices of "commoning". In Inner Mongolia, after the implementation of the "grassland and livestock double-contracted responsibility" policy, pastoralists had to endure the "the tragedy of the private" that featured the degradation of pastures and rise of production expenses. Now, several Gachas started to establish collective economy. This paper explores the two cases in which party branch took the lead to set up cooperatives in Xilingol League. Situated in a historical context of "collectivization-decollectivization-recollectivization", the two cases reveal how new collective economies expand ecological and social commons to help pastoralists achieve common prosperity. The "commoning" practices in China emphasize how government can play a key role leading to ecological "holistic productivity" and common economic prosperity, offering unique experience to the management of "commons" for the Global South.

The construction and development of protected areas not only has the important significance of maintaining the stability of the ecosystem, but also contains spatial political practices involving resource allocation, spatial construction, and multi-party power play. Based on the perspective of political ecology, this study was guided by national policies, and took different actors, namely the local government and villagers of Qi'ao Island, as the research objects, and used qualitative research methods to analyze the development process of Qi'ao Island Mangrove Nature Reserve. The study found that the spatial construction and power relationship evolution of the Qi'ao Island Mangrove Nature Reserve have gone through four stages, namely, resource development and ecological marginalization led by villagers' livelihoods, government-led ecological control and game, co-governance and power structure adjustment under mitigation policies, and scientific spatial planning and power resilience construction under the background of blue carbon ecology. Through the interpretation of these four stages, the transformation of power relations in the mangrove nature reserve of Qi'ao Island is clarified, in order to provide relevant suggestions for the development of other nature reserves and provide relevant reference solutions for the harmonious coexistence of local people and nature.

Because of the cultural and political nature of contemporary human waste, Metabolic rifts in waste disposal become more delayed in time, more widespread in space, and less visible in process, more entropy, which produced many kinds of injustice and worsen the existing ecological crisis. Black Soldier Fly (Hermetia illucens L.) is a kind of insect that can process organic wastes such as food waste and livestock manure without secondary pollution, and produce high-quality organic fertilizers and animal protein which can improve soil quality and substitute imported resources. As a non-human agent, Black Soldier Fly plays an important role in organic waste treatment, entropy thrift and balance of nature maintenance, and also has high value in resource utilization of organic waste. The promotion of Black Soldier Fly biotechnology to treat organic waste can not only repair the injustice resulted from current waste disposal methods from the dimensions of time, space, ethnic group and species, and also repair multiple Metabolic rifts in knowledge and emotion. The (re) discovery of non-human ecological citizens such as Black Soldier Fly tells us that the nature has great power to repair itself, but it requires human scientific discovery, technological collaboration, and reorganizing of human lifestyle.

The social integration of the floating population has emerged as a central issue in the context of China's new urbanization. Urban villages, as a primary type of migrant settlement, exert complex influences on migrants' integration experiences. However, the mechanisms through which residential conditions in urban villages affect social integration remain underexplored. Moreover, existing studies predominantly emphasize local integration processes, often overlooking the role of trans-regional interactions. Drawing on original survey data collected in Guangzhou, this study introduces a social capital perspective and develops a theoretical framework linking urban village residence-social capital–social integration. A moderated mediation model is employed to systematically examine: (1) the direct effects of residing in urban villages on social integration; (2) the mediating role of social capital, including relational networks, trust, and reciprocity norms; and (3) the moderating influence of return migration frequency. The findings indicate that: (1) living in urban villages significantly lowers the level of social integration among the floating population, reaffirming the spatial segregation effect; (2) social capital serves as a key mediating mechanism, with relationship networks, trust, and reciprocity acting as distinct transmission pathways; and (3) a higher frequency of returning to one's hometown mitigates the adverse effects of urban village residence on both social capital and social integration, by providing emotional, social, and material support from origin communities. This reveals the moderating function of cross-regional social ties in the integration process. This study advances current understandings of how urban village residential environments influence migrant integration, while extending the application of social capital theory within migration studies. It further highlights the potential of urban villages as spaces for social capital reconstruction and emphasizes the importance of migrants' sustained linkages between their hometowns and host cities. These insights contribute to promoting more inclusive and human-centered urbanization strategies.

Flood resilience reflects the comprehensive response ability of communities and regions in the face of flood disasters. With the acceleration of global climate change and urbanization, the risk of flood disasters is increasing. In this context, it is of great significance to carry out the assessment of flood resilience. In this paper, taking Guangdong Province in 2020 as an example, the evaluation index of flood resilience is constructed based on PSR model. Using Game Theory to combine subjective and objective weights, TOPSIS method is used to evaluate the flood resilience of 21 prefecture level cities in Guangdong Province, and its spatial characteristics and obstacle factors are analyzed. The results show that the level of flood resilience of most cities in Guangdong Province is not high, and there is a gap between different cities. On the whole, the level of flood resilience of cities in the Pearl River Delta is higher than that of other cities; Spatially, the level of flood resilience shows a spatial pattern with Guangzhou as the center, high in the South and low in the East, West and North, and there is a significant level of spatial aggregation; The main obstacle factors affecting flood resilience are: medical conditions, risk response ability and communication ability. The research results of this paper can provide the corresponding theoretical basis for the construction and management of urban flood resilience.

The geographical thoughts provide a solid theoretical support for the integration of the Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality Goals education into the high school geography teaching. The connotation and realization path of Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality Goals profoundly reflect the core concepts of geography, such as the coupling thought of geographical pattern and process, the holistic thought, the scale thought, and the man-land relationship. Based on the strong alignment between these two areas, this paper explores strategies for integrating geographical thought into high school geography teaching on Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality Goals. The aim is to leverage the strengths of geographical thought to advance the realization of the Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality Goals, cultivate students' awareness of Carbon Peaking and Carbon Neutrality Goals and lay the groundwork for addressing climate change and achieving sustainable development.