An integrated indicator on regional ecological civilization construction

Abstract

As the demand for natural resources is growing rapidly, along with rapid population growth, ecological and environmental problems have increasingly become the bottlenecks of sustainable development of China. In 2007, the Chinese government put forward "ecological civilization construction", and now 52 cities have been selected as " Ecological Civilization Cities" pilot sites. Recently, it also proposed to " Vigorously Promote the Construction of Ecological Civilization", which means ecological civilization should be conducted with the civilization of politics, economy, society and culture, simultaneously and equally importantly. With the concept of balancing the relationship between society development and nature protection, ecological civilization construction has already guided local sustainable development in many regions. However, due to the complexity of ecosystems and socioeconomic systems, it needs to scientifically evaluate the progress of regional ecological civilization construction. Then, it can help decision-makers and also can scientifically guide local sustainable development. Ecological civilization construction is an integrated process, and its core content is to keep in harmony development of all the components in the complex social-economic-natural ecosystems. Therefore, in this paper, s ecosystem services (ES), ecological footprint (EF) and gross domestic product (GDP) were selected in order to reflect the resource endowment, human occupation on natural capital, and the economic growth. Thus, an integrated indicator was constructed from the three indexes based on the linear correlation among them, an integrated indicator was constructed, which can comprehensively evaluate local ecological civilization construction. Based on the integrated indicator, 31 provinces were assessed on their progress of ecological civilization construction in China, in 2010. Then, we calculated ecosystem services, ecological index and the integrated indicator in each province. According to the results, we finally analyzed their ecological efficiency and ecological pressure during the process of ecological civilization construction. The results showed that Hainan province has the biggest indicator of 0.5091 while Beijing has the smallest indicator of 0.0377, which meant the potential capacity of ecological civilization construction of Hainan province is largest while Beijing had the least potential. This paper also analyzed the ecological efficiency and ecological pressure of ecological civilization construction of each province in China. It illustrated that, if human occupation on natural capital was low in one region, it can provide more goods and services to promote local sustainable development thanks to its healthy ecosystem; if human occupation is on a high level, its sustainable development capacity was relatively worse although the local ecosystem services were higher. However, if human occupation reached a very high level, their local development relied heavily on external input, and their sustainability was the worst.