Evaluating the sustainability of marine industrial parks based on the DPSIR framework

Abstract

Abstract In response to the intense development of the marine industry around the world, marine industrial parks are increasingly being established in coastal areas. To more effectively ensure the sustainable development of these industrial parks, an indicator system must be constructed to evaluate their sustainability. Therefore, a sustainability indicator system based on the driver-pressure-state-impact-response (DPSIR) framework was developed in this study and used to evaluate the sustainability of Shishi Marine Biotechnology Park, Fujian Province, China, between 2013 and 2016. Both the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the entropy method were used to calculate the weights of the indices, and the indicator variables and evaluation models were uniformly transformed to obtain normalized sustainability scores. During the initial development of Shishi Marine Biotechnology Park, excessive exploitation caused serious environmental problems that hindered sustainable development, and the park reached its lowest pressure index score (3.097) in 2015. After park managers, governments, and enterprises implemented some sustainability measures, which are heavily weighted in the calculation of the five indices in this indicator system, the comprehensive sustainability score for this park increased significantly, reaching its highest value of 6.173 in 2016.