The changes and influencing factors of urban LUCC and EF footprint in energy resource areas: An empirical evidence from China using HLM model

Abstract

Analyzing urban land use and cover change and its influence factors are of great significance for understanding the situation of regional development and environmental constraints and for evaluating the ability of sustainable development. This paper calculates the three-dimensional ecological footprint and total factor productivity of research cities, these cities have significant individual differences,Yinchuan, Shizuishan, Yan ‘an, Yulin, Ganzhou, Shaoguan etc. are energy resource areas and comparing to those Guangzhou, Dongguan, Wuzhong, Qingyuan etc. are non-energy resource leading cities. The HLM model is used to decompose the influencing factors of three-dimensional ecological footprint. The study shows the important role of total factor productivity in regional and urban sustainable development. Also, the study shows the inter-group differences of three-dimensional ecological footprint produced by cities with different population sizes. And the inter-group difference of urban three-dimensional ecological footprint under the influence of total factor productivity. Result shows that land, population and technology factors have different impacts on three-dimensional ecological footprint. Also, relying mainly on mining areas of energy resources and other industries dominated areas of mining land proportion and industrial structure differences did not lead to the influence of different ecological footprint, energy resource area in affecting factors, the ecological footprint is still a total factor plays the leading role of ecological rate, population and real GDP, There is no obvious negative externality effect of mining activities on the value of regional ecological products, and the regional ecological carrying capacity keeps improving.