Study on the Measures for Optimizing China’s Provincial Territorial Space Based on the Perspective of Resource and Environmental Carrying Capacity in the New Situation

Abstract

The comprehensive resource and environment carrying capacity (RECC) evaluation is an important method for measuring the rationality of the population, resource, and environment allocation, which is an important scientific guidance for scientific research and the judgment of regional economic and social development potential and the optimization of the national land spatial pattern. This paper constructs a comprehensive evaluation index system of the RECC under the new situation of climate policy and high-quality economic development; it analyzes the factors influencing the RECC, the overall level, the spatial difference, and the carrying status by using the TOPSIS model based on the entropy weight method, and it identifies the shortcomings; then, it analyzes the characteristics of regional dynamic change and sustainable development trend, and finally, it simulates the optimal spatial pattern under the scenario simulated by the FLUS model. The conclusions are as follows: ① the resource factors have the greatest influence on the carrying capacity of the resources and the environment, followed by economic factors. Among them, per capita water resources, forest coverage rate, and health institutions have the highest impact on RECC. ② The overall level of comprehensive RECC from 2015 to 2020 shows an upward trend, and although the positive impact of resource-led provinces on the level of economic development power and RECC is greater than the negative one, the environmental support is the shortcoming of the future development of the regional economy. ③ The overall spatial performance of RECC is characterized as being high in Guanzhong, second in northern Shaanxi, and low in southern Shaanxi. The northern area of Yulin in the Guanzhong Plain City Cluster, which is an important national energy chemical base, is the core of the national-level urbanization development areas, and the northern area of the Guanzhong Plain City Cluster is the key choice of the provincial-level urbanization development areas. The area along the west bank of the Yellow River in the Qinba Mountain area in southern Shaanxi and the Baiyu Mountain area in northern Shaanxi can be positioned as national key ecological function areas.