The establishment of an eco-environmental evaluation model for southwest China and eastern South Africa based on the DPSIR framework

Abstract

The establishment of a standard and unified evaluation system model and its application to a cross-regional eco-environmental quality evaluation and analysis are required for identifying patterns of change in eco-environmental quality in different regions and the driving factors. This knowledge is important for achieving sustainable development. This study used remote sensing (RS) data and geographic information science (GIS) to construct a unified eco-environmental quality evaluation index system based on the Driving Forces, Pressure, State, Impact and Response (DPSIR) framework and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), the Entropy method, and Grey Relational Analysis (GRA). The index system was applied to evaluate the eco-environmental quality of central Yunnan Province (CYP) and eastern South Africa (ESA) at the county scale and to identify driving factors. The results showed that: (1) The mean ecological quality index of all counties (districts/cities) in the ESA in 2019 was 0.3696, which was slightly higher than that of 0.3449 in the CYP, indicating similar total ecological quality between the CYP and ESA. (2) The Moran's I value of eco-environmental quality in the CYP and ESA both exceeded 0, with significant spatial agglomerations. (3) The strongest correlations were between state class indicators and eco-environmental quality in both study areas. The grey relational coefficients exceeded 0.9, representing state indicators (such as vegetation coverage, habitat quality index, remote-sensed vegetation water supply index, vegetation net primary productivity, and annual mean precipitation) as the main driving forces of eco-environmental quality.