Abstract
In this paper, the overall ecological and environmental sustainability in the Cing-Jing region in Taiwan is examined. As land use and cover change has been found to be an important analysis method, an emergy ecological footprint model was applied and the eco-security assessed to ensure authorities maintain a balance between ecological preservation and tourism development. While the ecological environment in the Cing-Jing region from 2008 to 2014 was found to be within safe levels, all related indices had increased considerably. A Grey model was used to predict the 2015–2024 ecological carrying capacities, from which it was found that there is expected to be a large increase in per capita ecological footprints (EFs), meaning that in the future there is going to be a larger ecological deficit and a higher ecological pressure index (EFI), with the eco-security predicted to reach a Grade 2 intermediate level in 2022. As the Cing-Jing region is predicted to become ecologically unsustainable, local, regional, and national governments need to implement regulations to strictly control the land use in the Cing-Jing region. This study demonstrated that emergy EF (EEF) theory application can give objective guidance to decision-makers to ensure that recreational non-urban eco-security can be maintained at a safe level.
Highlights
Due to urbanization and agricultural and tourism land use, there has been increasing research interest in the effects of global land use and land cover [1,2,3,4]
Grey theory, developed originally by Deng [43], is a multidisciplinary, generic theory that deals with systems characterized by a lack of comprehensive information
Based on the fundamental grey prediction model data, by examining the ecological footprints (EFs) in this time series we are able to provide a comparison for per capita emergy EF (EEF) or environmental carrying capacity (ECC) in different years, so as to predict how the resource environment in Cing-Jing is going to develop in the future
Summary
Due to urbanization and agricultural and tourism land use, there has been increasing research interest in the effects of global land use and land cover [1,2,3,4]. The impact of urban expansion on natural environments has become a major focus for the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) and, as a result of these rising global concerns, the Urban Peri-Urban Environmental Change (PU-ECH) Research Project was activated. Previous studies on land use and the associated environmental impacts have tended to only focus on exploring the effects from a single perspective, but there have been few studies that have investigated the impact of land development and land use changes on the natural environment or have decomposed, analyzed, and synthesized the effect of complex socio-economic variables on natural. Public Health 2017, 14, 136; doi:10.3390/ijerph14020136 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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