Abstract
China’s high-speed socioeconomic development has been characterized by rapid urbanization and a series of ecological environment issues, especially air pollution. This paper proposed a comprehensive indicator system for the evaluation of urbanization and the air environment in Wuhan, a metropolis in central China, and then investigated the relationship between urbanization and the air environment from the perspective of coupling coordination theory. Furthermore, a coupling coordination degree model (CCDM) was constructed to estimate the relationship by using panel data collected from 1996–2013. The results showed the following: (1) Spatial urbanization and air environment quality make the greatest contributions to the compound system compared to other first grade indicators, indicating that they are critical factors to consider when the government is making relevant decisions about urban sprawl. (2) The comprehensive level of the air environment initially decreased from 1996–1998 and then increased with fluctuations in Wuhan, with several inflection points, meaning that the variation process of the air environment is unstable and repetitive, and efforts to improve the air environment must persist over a long period of time. Lastly, (3) the degree of coordinated coupling between urbanization and the air environment exhibited an S-shaped curve, indicating that Wuhan changed from having slightly unbalanced development to barely balanced development and then entered into a period of superiorly balanced development, with the air environment lagging. Thus, the ambient urban air quality has been subject to great pressure, and the government should continue to take effective action to improve it.
Highlights
The relationship between urbanization and the ecological environment has become a crucial issue of geography and urban development studies [1,2]
In terms of the comprehensive weight of each index, the percentage of the nonagricultural population (0.080), the percentage of tertiary industry employment (0.069), the built-up area (0.067), urban living space per capita (0.063), and the percentage of second industry employment (0.062) are the five impact indicators that have the greatest effect. They account for 34.1% of the total effect and are mainly expressed in demographic urbanization and spatial urbanization
In this paper, taking Wuhan as an example, we developed a coupling coordination degree model (CCDM) to quantitatively evaluate the degree of coupling between these two systems
Summary
The relationship between urbanization and the ecological environment has become a crucial issue of geography and urban development studies [1,2]. With its rapid economic growth, China's urbanization level has grown tremendously [3,4,5]. The rate of, demographic urbanization grew from 17.9% in 1978 to 53.73% in 2013, with an average annual growth of approximately 0.99%. This extensive economic growth has created high levels of pollution and energy consumption, and low efficiency. Quantitatively investigating and exploring the relationship between urbanization and the air environment can provide a reference for sustainable urban development planning and environmental policymaking
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