Abstract
The conflict between economic development and environmental protection has become increasingly prominent in the urbanization process of the Yangtze River urban agglomeration, the most economically developed region in Jiangsu Province in China. In order to investigate the sustainable development status, and thus provide decision support for the sustainable development of this region, the ecological footprint model was utilized to evaluate and analyze the ecological footprint per capita, the ecological carrying capacity per capita, and the ecological deficit per capita for the period from 2013 to 2017. Furthermore, the Grey model is employed to predict the development trend of the ecological footprint for 2018 to 2022. The evaluation results show that the ecological footprint per capita has been increasing year by year since 2013, reaching a peak of 2.3897 hm2 in 2015 before declining again. In the same period, the available ecological carrying capacity per capita and the ecological footprint per capita basically developed in the same direction, resulting in an ecological deficit per capita and gradually increasing from 2013 to a peak of 2.0303 hm2 in 2015 before declining. It is also found that the change of ecological carrying capacity is not substantial, and the change of the ecological deficit is mainly caused by a huge change of the ecological footprint. The forecast results show that the ecological deficit per capita will reach 1.1713 hm2 in 2018, which will be another deficit peak after 2015. However, in the later period until 2022, the ecological deficit per capita will begin to decline year by year. These results can provide effective inspirations for reducing the ecological deficit of the Yangtze River urban agglomeration, thus promoting the coordinated development of the economy and environment in this area.
Highlights
The conflict between the slow formation rate of natural resources and the growing demand for human beings is the core issue of regional and global sustainable development
ecological footprint (EF) = N × e f where ef is the EF per capita; j is the type of productivity land; i is the category of the consumption item; wj is the equivalence factor; Yj is the yield factor; Ai is the area of the consumption item; cj is the amount of consumption per capita of i item; pj is the local unit area yield of consumption item I; and EF and N are the total EF and population of a region, respectively
We divide the consumption of biological resources into crop products, animal products, forest products, and other projects, and use the world average production data on biological resources calculated by the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization in 1993 to convert the production area of biological resources
Summary
The conflict between the slow formation rate of natural resources and the growing demand for human beings is the core issue of regional and global sustainable development. Most scholars in China adopted the analytic hierarchy process [29,30] The advantage of this method is that it determines whether the current EC of the region is in a deficit, and possibly derives ecological flexibility and investigates whether the environment is in a low- or high-pressure state. As an emerging national strategy, the evaluation and prediction of the EC of the Yangtze river urban agglomeration is conducive to better understanding the current status and development trend of the regional carrying capacity, and to realizing the sustainable development of its resources and environment, which is of positive significance for advancing China’s urbanization construction and the Belt and Road construction.
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