Modeling and dynamic assessment of urban economy–resource–environment system with a coupled system dynamics – geographic information system model

Abstract

At present, environmental issues associated with rapid economic development are becoming critical concerns that arouse government's and people's particular attention. A large amount of influencing factors and especially their complicated interactions have always thrown confused insights into assessing the dynamic evolvement and sustainable development of urban economy–resource–environment (ERE) system and programming the developing strategies. A combination of system dynamics (SD) and geographic information system (GIS) is expected to explicitly understand the synergic interaction and feedback among a variety of influencing factors in time and space, since SD model can extend the spatial analysis functions of GIS to realize both dynamic simulation and trend prediction of an ERE system development. According to connotation and framework of sustainable development, this study proposes a dynamic combination method of SD–GIS to model and evaluate the urban development in Chongqing city of China suffering from depletion of resource and degradation of environment. To compare different policy inclinations with regard to potential ERE effects, typical scenarios (current, resource, technology and environment scenarios) are designed by adjusting the parameters in the model and changing the specification of some variables. Integrated assessment results indicate that the current ERE system of Chongqing is not sustainable; environment scenario is more effective to sustainable development of urban ERE system in a long run. Under the considerations of development features and regional differences, as well as regular discipline on urbanization, a coordinated combination of environmental, resource and technology scenarios is anticipated to realize sustainable development of urban ERE system.