Abstract

Conducting quantitative researches by using high quality environmental big data in social science fields is one of the key aspects in enhancing China's environmental governance capacity. This paper defines the environmental big data system based on 5V model of big data, and establishes an analytical framework for analyzing the application of environmental big data. The analyses consist of reviewing researches in social science which involve five different environmental data types such as macro-level environmental statistics, micro-level environmental data, environmental monitoring data, satellite data and miscellaneous data. This paper finds each type of environmental data has its own advantages and disadvantages. When compared to the traditional statistical data, although environment data in new forms typically have higher time and spatial resolutions, they provide less information on pollution types and typically have low data qualities. As a result, the latter ones are currently applied to study some specific environmental problems, but have great potentials in the future. In order to expand and deepen the applications of environmental big data, more efforts should be made in three aspects such as improving data qualities, adopting new analytical techniques and enhancing collaborations.

Citation

Haoqi Qian, (2020), Recent Development and Research Prospect of Application of Environmental Big Data, Journal of Environmental Economics, 4, 152-180.