Study On Regulation Strategy Of Land Heavy Metal Pollution Based On Evolutionary Game And Simulation Analysis

With decades of high-speed economic development in China, a variety of environmental problems have become increasingly severe. Land resources in many areas of our country have been severely damaged by serious heavy metal pollution,resulting in reduced or even loss of production capacity. This problem has threatened our country’s food security and public health. The effectiveness of pollution control and land restoration is not very satisfactory, though the central government and local governments have long paid great attention to the problem, and a number of related policy documents have been launched in recent years, and some local governments have even invested a lot of money, technology and manpower to research and develop land rehabilitation technology. Hu et al. (2000) attributed this problem to administrative failure, and they believed that the problem of conflict of interest between different types of stakeholders in the process of pollution control is more critical than the pure land heavy metal pollution control. In recent years, some cases are not conducive to control the land heavy metal pollution have been emerging in recent years across China, such as pollution rebound phenomenon, environmental information distortion, poor public appeal channels, bad local government cooperation,having seriously hindered the land heavy metal pollution control work. Therefore, to achieve the sustainable use of land resources in China and even the national socio-economic sustainable development, it has been a meaningful work to analyze the behavioral strategies of the main stakeholders in the process of land heavy metal pollution control work and explain the reasons for their conflicts of interest from the perspective of stakeholders, and look for effective countermeasures to coordinate the conflicts and promote the progress of land heavy metal pollution control.The main research objectives of this paper are:(1) Summarizing the typical problems in the process of heavy metal pollution control in our country, determining the main problems in the treatment of land heavy metal pollution. Then we define the main stakeholders in the process of controlling land heavy metal pollution according to related economics and management theories,and analyze their interests, behavioral strategies, game relations and the games’ focus.(2) Constructing evolutionary game models, analyzing the dynamic trends of the behavioral strategies between stakeholders and their influencing factors. We further use the Vensim PLE software to simulate the evolutionary games’ processes under a longitudinal analysis path of "Central Government -- local government -- enterprise --public" and a horizontal analysis path of "local government -- local government".The conclusions of stakeholder behavior analysis are as follows:(1) Several strategies can be taken in order to encourage enterprises to actively control the problem of land heavy metal pollution, such as increasing the reward to the enterprises which adopt the "governance" strategy and the punishment to the enterprises which adopt the "illegal" strategy; increasing the reward to the local governments actively fulfill its regulatory responsibilities to protect environment;increasing the social negative effects of polluting environment on the enterprises;increasing the compensations to the success of public appeal; reducing the cost of governance pollution; reducing the public appeal costs.(2) In order to prevent collusions between government and enterprises which may lead to increasing pollution, several strategies can be taken as follows: increasing the punishment from the central government to local governments which condone the behavior of illegal sewage; increasing the probability that the central government finds the collusion between local governments and enterprises; reducing the output of an enterprise by bribing local governments to expand the production scale.(3) In order to promote the formation of cooperative relations between neighboring areas to jointly control the land heavy metal pollution, several strategies can be taken as follows: increasing the proportion of scores of environmental conditions in the assessment of local government performance; increasing the differential reward coefficient and differential penalty coefficient of the local government pollution control; increasing the reward to the local government which adopt the "governance" strategy and the punishment to the local government which do not adopt the strategy; increasing the compensation for the affected areas by the governments of the sewage areas; increasing the positive impact on the local government brought from its pollution control work; increasing the bad impact on the local government brought from its neglect of governance pollution; reducing the cost of appeals from affected areas or the cost of government pollution.The conclusions of evolutionary game between stakeholders:(1) In order to promote enterprises to take measures to control land heavy metal pollution, we can raise the reward from local government on enterprises taking"governance" strategy, raise the punishment from local government on enterprises taking "illegal" strategy,raise the reward from the central government on the local governments performing regulatory duties to protect environmental, raise social impact of environmental pollution on enterprises, raise the amount of compensation that has been successfully obtained by public appeal, reduce the cost of heavy metal pollution control of enterprises and reducing the cost of public appeal.(2) In order to prevent local governments from forming collusion with the enterprises, the central government can raise the probability of local government and enterprises to form collusion by raising the punishment on the local government to indulge the illegal discharge of enterprises,and reducing the profit of the enterprises obtained by bribing local government officials.(3) In order to promote the formation of cooperative relations between neighboring regions to jointly control land heavy metal pollution, we can raise the proportion of the local environmental performance assessment in the local government performance evaluation,raise the differential reward coefficient and differential penalty coefficient of local government,raise the central government’s reward for local government’ controlling pollution and punishment for local government’ not controlling pollution, raise the amount of compensation to the government of injured region from the government of sewage region, raise the positive impact of treatment on the government of sewage region for controlling pollution and raise the negative impact of treatment on the government of sewage region for not controlling pollution,reduce the cost of appeals of local government from affected areas, and reduce the cost of heavy metal pollution control.In view of the evolutionary game analysis provided by the regulation strategy will be greatly limited in the reality, this paper combined with the actual situation and optimize the regulation strategies of the central and local governments.Optimization of the local government’s regulation strategies:First of all, the local government adopted the dynamic penalty strategy on enterprises, making the punishment is directly related to the attitude of enterprises to prevent and control pollution and the status of land environmental pollution. Bu doing so, we can effectively prevent pollution rebound phenomenon and encourage enterprises to adopt an environmentally friendly mode of production. In addition, the greater the intensity of the local government’s dynamic punishment strategy is, the more it can make the enterprise take the initiative to deal with the waste and avoid the pollution of the land environment.Secondly, the local government rewards the public for appealing not only encourages enterprises to take the initiative to prevent land heavy metal pollution, but makes the public to do the obligations of supervision.Optimization of the central government’s regulation strategies:First of all, the central government should severely punish both the local government officials and sewage enterprises in order to prevent local governments and enterprises to form a conspiracy.Second, in the case of both neighboring regions are polluters. The central government should take different strategies for differential incentives and differential penalties on local governments.Third, in the case of that one of the neighboring regions is polluter. Appropriate compensation for local governments actively manage pollution is a wise choice for the central government when the cost of governance environmental pollution is high.The main innovations of this paper are as follows:(1) Based on the typical cases of land heavy metal pollution in China and related theory,we construct a comprehensive analysis framework for the regulation of land heavy metal pollution, and put forward comprehensive analysis of the games between the various stakeholders in the process of land heavy metal pollution control under a longitudinal analysis path of "Central Government -- local government -- enterprise --public" and a horizontal analysis path of "local government -- local government". By doing so, we can explore the reasons of the major problems in the land heavy metal pollution work and look for effective ways to solve the problems.(2) We adopt a hypothetical condition that is closer to the reality in this paper, that is, the bounded rational hypothesis of the game participant and the multiple game hypotheses. In addition, the qualitative and quantitative research methods are applied in the evolutionary game analysis, we not only put forward qualitative analysis through evolutionary game model, but quantitative simulation analysis based on system dynamics models, which can provide intuitive descriptions for the processes of evolutionary games.(3) We optimized the regulation of land heavy metal pollution. Based on the analysis of the game relationships between the main stakeholders in the process of land heavy metal pollution control work, this paper deeply analyzes the main influencing factors of heavy metal pollution control and obtain some meaningful conclusions though constructing evolutionary game models and system dynamics models.Countermeasures of main problems in the process of land heavy metal pollution control work are put forward and testified, which are helpful to promote the land heavy metal pollution control work and achieve the desired goals.This paper constructs the comprehensive analysis framework of the evolutionary games in the process of land heavy metal pollution control work, including several main stakeholders, enriching the theory system of land heavy metal pollution control,revealing the influence mechanism of the effect of land heavy metal pollution control work, and putting forward some feasible countermeasures. The research results of this paper are of great theoretical and practical significance, which can provide some academic support for the land heavy metal pollution work in China.