Spatiotemporal evolutions and driving factors of green development performance of cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt

Abstract

Assessing green development performance is of great significance for guiding cities to realize coordinated urban development. Considering that green development is a complex system that couples social economy and resource environment, an index system that contains 26 indicators for measuring the green development performance of cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) was constructed from three perspectives: green growth degree, green carrying capacity and green guarantee capability. The green development performance of 110 prefecture cities in the YREB during 2011–2017 were assessed based on the entropy weight method, and then the driving factors of cities' green development performance were analyzed by using the obstacle degree model. The results show that the green development performance of cities in the YREB had increased from 2011 to 2017 with an average growth rate of 19.16%, but overall was not high. Especially, green guarantee capability of most cities was low and didn't improve much during 2011–2017. The green development performance of cities in the YREB overall presented high in the east and low in the west, with the cities of medium-high and high values mostly concentrated in the economically developed areas, such as the lower reach of the YREB and the provincial capital cities. Specifically, cities in the lower reach of the YREB, especially Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, had the highest level of green development, but with relatively low growth rate. The cities in the upper and middle reaches of the YREB had relatively low level of green development, but the overall growth rate was high, especially the Guizhou province has the highest growth rate of 35%. The obstacle factors analysis revealed that insufficient economic development, poor green life guarantee capability and incomplete ecological protection were key factors affecting the green development performance of cities in the YREB. Based on these findings, we suggest that to further strengthen the ability of economic growth and enhance public infrastructure service and ecological and environmental protection are important for promoting the level of green development in the YREB.