The Yellow River Basin is an important birthplace of Chinese civilization, the main hub of historical evolution, and the key support of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin are related to the overall situation of comprehensively promoting Chinese path to modernization. The Yellow River Basin is an economic, social, ecological, and cultural complex system that is comprehensive, holistic, diverse, and complex, while also having close and distant coupling relationships with external regions. In the past five years since the implementation of the major national strategy for ecological protection and high-quality development in the Yellow River Basin, there has been a turning point in the quality of the ecological environment in the basin. The ability to maintain national food and energy security has significantly improved, and solid steps have been taken in the development of urban and rural areas. New breakthroughs have been made in cultural inheritance and development, and domestic and international opening-up and cooperation have reached a higher level. The industrial economy in the basin has made significant progress in innovation, green development, and coordination. The support capacity for technological innovation has been enhanced, and the transformation of industrial structure has achieved initial results. The efficiency of resources and environment has been greatly improved. Anchoring the grand goal of basically achieving socialist modernization by 2035, it is necessary to seize the opportunity of cultivating and developing new quality productive forces on the premise of better coordinated development and security, promote economic-social-environmental co-upgrading with high-quality population development, coordinate the nexus of people-water-food-energy-carbon-ecology, accelerate the construction of the physically bounded Yellow River National Cultural Park, and explore the modernization path of the great river basin to achieve high-quality integrated development of economy, society, ecology, and culture in a coordinated manner. In order to drive the transformation and upgrading of industries, the basin needs continuously to promote regional coordinated development, technological innovation, consumption upgrading, and high-level opening up. Aiming to give full play to the role of national energy security ballast stones and important production bases for green energy in the Yellow River Ji-shaped bend, it also needs to accelerate the construction of national energy security guarantee bases in the Ji-shaped riverbend. Facing the complex human-water relationship, the Yellow River Basin needs to construct a coupled model of the human-nature system based on human-water relationship and systematically understand the human-water relationship in the Yellow River including the integrity from the perspective of the nexus, the systematicity from the perspective of critical threshold, and the synergy from the perspective of remote coupling, which is an important scientific and technological support for promoting ecological protection and high-quality development in this region.

The phenomenon of food waste has aroused great concern from the international community, and some foreign countries have regulated it by law in a comprehensive way. In China, food waste mainly occurs in the public catering industry. In the whole society, we must form a legal atmosphere of being glorious to save and shameful to waste. The occasions of food waste mainly include wedding party, "event banquet", business dinner and dinner with friends. The causes of food waste include constraints of science and technology, subjective factors of actors and inherent defects of traditional ownership system. Although there are laws concerning food waste in China, the current provisions are relatively principled and scattered, lacking systematicness and maneuverability. To regulate food waste behavior by law is the need of ensuring food security, fulfilling international obligations, saving resources, protecting ecological environment, upgrading and integrating legal norms. The food waste behavior of public legal subjects and individuals in food production, processing and consumption should be comprehensively regulated by a special law, which should be formulated by the NPC Standing Committee under the guidance of the notion of social attribute of resources and the idea of green development, through direct prohibition, tax adjustment, consumption guidance and other ways. The legal regulation should focus on food and food waste behavior.

Nowadays, China has fully come into the massive tourism era. Tourism continuously occupies one most quickly growing industry in the macro-economy and becomes a strategic pillar industry in regional economic development. Since China is rich in tourism resources, which are the foundation of conventional tourism development, it is crucial to deal with the relationship between property protection and utilization of tourism resources, meanwhile, achieving innovative development. In this issue, 16 young tourism geographers discuss tourism resources protection and utilization in the new era. They clarify a set of key points about tourism resources research, including new knowledge of value, new ways to protect and use, and new discussions for special resources. The main points state as follows. (1) Massive tourism mode changing bring the industry innovation, as well as resources' meaning expansion. In the new era, by embracing a perspective of construction, generalization, and a combination of tourism resources, we need to rethink how to define, classify and evaluate these resources. In the future, resources will still be the basis of tourism development, which should capture more reasonable recognition of their new characteristics and values. (2) Under the constraints of ecological reserves, controls in exploitation of traditional resources will be more severe. From the supply-side, considering the transformation from resources to products, we should take more measures such as complying with the market rules, meeting tourists' new needs, excavating cultural senses, creating new developing paths amid new technologies support, and forming popular products. These measures will be beneficial to stimulate the marketing values, upgrade the regional industry, and realize to coordinate resources, capital, and assets in a sustainable way. (3) From the demand-side, we should be aware of the common changes of tourists, lead to new behavioral norms in civilized tourism, and guide the tourists to protect resources spontaneously, which will rewardingly balance environmental protection and industrial development. (4) Abundant resources require diverse approaches to protect and rationally use. In light of rural tourism resources, we should assess their new value, follow the strategy of rural vitalization, suit measures to local conditions, pay main concerns on tourism agglomerations, consider local communities' interests, and innovatively promote sustainable development. Based primarily on sustainability, agricultural heritages re-use needs to be concerned about novel multi-participation machinery dynamically. For human tourism resources, it is necessary to maintain authenticity with traditional culture integration, and coordinate cultural inheritance and tourism growth. Mentioned with ethnic tourism resources in mountainous region, we suggest paying attention to the uniqueness of regional system, taking account of the contemporary value and human-land relationship, and then adopting appropriate measures. Besides, owing to homestay's role in activating rural stacks, it is recommended to enhance ecological protection, and boost the homestay cluster.

Building ecological civilization is a millennium plan for the sustainable development of the Chinese nation. In order to maintain global ecological security, build a beautiful China, create a good production and living environment for the people, and achieve the goal of adhering to the harmonious coexistence of man and nature, we should get a better understanding of the laws of nature and respect the planet. To respect the earth and regulate human behavior, we must realize and adopt the concept that lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets, adhere to the basic national policy of prioritizing resources conservation and environmental protection, and take the ecological environment as our lives. The principle of recovery is to let nature restore itself, develop spatial layouts, industrial structures, way of work and life that can help conserve resources and protect the environment. With this, we can make the earth a natural, harmonious and beautiful home for mankind.

The rural revitalization, as a national strategy in the new era, puts forward the requirements and goals of the thriving industry, pleasant living environments, social etiquette and civility, effective governance and prosperity. China is a country with a vast territory, marked by regional differences in resource and economic development levels. What's more, rural areas are complex, diverse, and have many problems. Rural revitalization is a systematic project with comprehensive, complex and regional characteristics. Sixteen young scholars in the field of rural geography across the country have conducted in-depth discussions and reflections on the scientific path of rural revitalization in China. The core points are as follows: (1) In accordance with the law of time-space distribution, we should fully understand the connection between the historical basis of rural development and the practical needs, establish a theoretical and technical system that highlights regional characteristics and has operability, and promote the transformation of rural residential environment, industrial system and governance mode in a classified and orderly manner. (2) Rural revitalization strives for the integration between urban and rural areas to build a compound multi-center network system, which breaks through the village and town systems of traditional linear "central place", and innovate the spatial organization mode of "village cluster". Rural endogenous force, urban radiation force and planning binding force jointly drive rural revitalization. (3) The agriculture has multiple functions such as food safety, social stability, and ecological products. Its development needs to create the whole value chain of agriculture to promote the integration of primary, secondary and tertiary industries. (4) In energy-rich areas, we should fundamentally solve the problem of unbalanced and inadequate rural development under the premise of ensuring the national energy security demand. In Southwest China, we should take advantage of ecology and human resources to build a modern agricultural industry system, remodel the brand of rural tourism, and build landscape rural homes. In Northeast China, rural revitalization must proceed in an orderly and classified way in the process of synergistic promotion of the "northeast revitalization" strategy. In the Yangtze River Delta region, it is necessary to cognize the evolutionary stages from rural industrialization to rural urbanization, and then to rural characteristics with more and more emphasis on the social, cultural and ecological construction of rural areas, seeking a scientific path of rural revitalization. In Northwest China, we propose to effectively improve the ability of "independent poverty alleviation" in rural areas under the premise of ecological protection, and realize the transformation from "transfusing blood" to "producing blood". In the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, oriented by equalization of basic public services in urban and rural areas, we will promote the development of urban-rural integration and rural revitalization. In resource-oriented areas, rural industries will replace the industrial system formed around resource exploitation with an efficient agricultural system integrating primary, secondary and tertiary industries. In traditional agricultural areas, it is necessary to optimize the coupling pattern between farmland use transformation and rural labor structure change, which is an important means to achieve rural revitalization. In economically developed areas, villages with "mixed" characteristics need to activate the assets and capital attributes of rural land resources, promote the integration and activation of spatial order, and comprehensively explore the modern rural governance mode with the participation of multiple subjects.

The proposal or implementation of major resource development and utilization project often receives widespread concerns from the whole society. How to correctly understand and scientifically evaluate various hot research topics about resources and environment is the key point of discussion. This paper argues that the development project of any major resources must follow natural laws, ecological laws, resource laws, and economic laws. We must carry out systematic and comprehensive pre-stage surveys based on the country’s strategic needs and geopolitical relations, evaluate the ecological safety and the resource engineering safety from the perspectives of multiple disciplinarians, and make correct judgments on the scientific value, social value and economic value of the project. Authors strongly suggest that: 1) the future construction of resource and environmental engineering projects should not make forward in great leaps; 2) for protecting the beautiful home of the earth, we need to recognize laws of natural resource systems through scientific study; 3) resource scientists should fulfill their social responsibilities; 4) academic contending should be advocated on the basis of scientific research and scientific attitudes; 5) scientific issues are better to be discussed by scientists; and 6) it should be very cautious to support researches on controversial scientific topics by public welfare funds.