Abstract
The Chinese government started an important project “Geographical conditions monitoring (GCM)” in 2012, which aims at fully revealing the spatial pattern of natural resources, and economic and social development. Urban development assessment and analysis are an important topic of the comprehensive statistics in GCM project. This study quantitatively evaluates the sustainable development level of 287 cities at prefecture level and above in China and analyzes their spatial distribution. Both an index system of urban sustainable development (USI) constructed by three aspects, namely society, economy and environment, and the TOPSIS-Entropy method are adopted. The results show that the overall level of urban sustainable development in China is not high, and obvious differences in urban sustainable development among cities exist. The coordination of social, economic and environmental sustainable development in China is at a low level. In terms of spatial distribution, cities from eastern coastal areas of China are at relatively higher levels of sustainable development with central and northeastern cities ranking second and western ones lowest. Several spatial clusters of urban sustainable development can be found. The “High–High” clusters, in which cities have high levels of sustainable development, are distributed in urban agglomerations. Finally, some suggestions have been provided to achieve all-round sustainable development in China.
Highlights
The United Nations Development Summit held in September 2015 formally adopted the agreement “Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development”, embracing the three dimensions of sustainability, economic, social and environmental, aiming at ending global poverty and building a life of dignity for all
A list of evaluation systems for urban sustainability composed of various sets of indicators were proposed by international and regional organizations at early stage, such as “Driving force-State-Response (DSR)” model developed by The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) [3], “Pressure-State-Response (PRS)” model employed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) [4], “Society-economy-environment” framework proposed by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) [5] and “Expanding the Measure of Wealth: Indicators of Environmentally Sustainable Development” developed by the World Bank [6]
Qualitative analysis mainly focuses on the process, paths and origin causes of urban development [20,21,22,23,24]; quantitative research includes the synthetic evaluation of urban sustainable level [25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32], and driving force analysis [25,31] and trend analysis [19,29,30] of urban sustainable development
Summary
The United Nations Development Summit held in September 2015 formally adopted the agreement “Transforming our world: The 2030 agenda for sustainable development”, embracing the three dimensions of sustainability, economic, social and environmental, aiming at ending global poverty and building a life of dignity for all. A list of evaluation systems for urban sustainability composed of various sets of indicators were proposed by international and regional organizations at early stage, such as “Driving force-State-Response (DSR)” model developed by The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) [3], “Pressure-State-Response (PRS)” model employed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) [4], “Society-economy-environment” framework proposed by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) [5] and “Expanding the Measure of Wealth: Indicators of Environmentally Sustainable Development” developed by the World Bank [6] These index systems pay more attention to constructing theoretical frameworks of sustainable development, and do not meet the actual demands of different countries. Cities in the study region are distributed into 17 of those urban agglomerations: the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Middle Yangtze River, Chengdu-Chongqing, Shandong Peninsula, Hachang, Mid-southern Liaoning, West Taiwan Strait, Guanzhong, Central Plains, Beibu Gulf, Hu-Bao-E-Yu, Jinzhong, Lanzhou-Xining, Dianzhong and Qianzhong
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