Abstract
Under the concept of green development, the promotion of ecological sustainable development capability has become an important policy objective of the Chinese government. Based on the three-dimensional ecological footprint model, this paper analyzes the ecological footprint, ecological carrying capacity, and ecological sustainable development capacity of Hunan province from 2005 to 2015. The results show that the total ecological footprint of Hunan increases from 2005 to 2015, in which the forest land ecological footprint accounts for the largest proportion. The ecological footprint depth is always greater than 1, indicating that Hunan has been in a state of ecological deficit; in the context of the distribution, the ecological pressure of Hunan shows a “high in surround while low in central” pattern. The results about the ecological footprint diversity index show that although the ecosystem of Hunan is stability, the level of eco-economic development ability is low. The ecological efficiency represented by GDP per unit of ecological footprint shows that Hunan’s ecological efficiency increases with an average rate of 13.12% annually during 2005–2015 because of the improvement of the factor substitution.
Highlights
Humanity’s survival and development depend on the ecological environment, and greatly affect the ecological environment
The ecological footprint model, which has been used to evaluate the ecological sustainability of China or a typical region in a large number of literatures sources, is a method which tries to calculate the degree of human utilization of natural data and the function of life support services provided by nature to human beings
Fang [45] analyzed ecological footprint in China from 1961 to 2006 by using a 3D ecological footprint model, and it is concluded that the footprint depth has almost tripled since 1978 when China entered an ecological deficit era, while the footprint size declined by 11.84%
Summary
Humanity’s survival and development depend on the ecological environment, and greatly affect the ecological environment. In December 2017, the Chinese government first published the regional green development index, which is considered as a major measure for the central government to strengthen the construction of ecological civilization and highlight the assessment of sustainable development goals. The ecological footprint method was initially proposed by Wackernagel and Rees, quantitative evaluating the degree of sustainable utilization of resources through accounting and comparing the gap between the demand of human economic system for natural ecosystem services and the carrying capacity of natural ecosystem. The scientific interests of this study focused on the following: (1) evaluating the ecological footprint (EF), ecological carrying capacity, ecological sustainable development capacity, and ecological efficiency of Hunan Province—a typical province in central China—from 2006 to 2015, and comprehensively using the ecological sustainable development index, based on a three-dimensional (3D) ecological footprint model. This study is so meaningful that it provides an academic reference of ecological sustainability analysis, and it provides a scientific basis for sustainable development strategies that can be employed in construction of the ecological civilization in other provinces
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