Urban ecosystem health evaluation for typical Chinese cities along the Belt and Road

Abstract

As key social nodes and development engines, the status of various cities is important for the construction of “the Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” (hereafter called the “B&R”). To comprehensively evaluate the status of cities along the B&R, the concept of urban ecosystem health was applied in this paper, and an innovative assessment framework of “structure-function-process-development” was proposed based on the understanding of the concept of urban ecosystem health. Then, four-layer assessment indicators were established to reflect the health status of urban ecosystems. Subsequently, a fuzzy matter-element model was constructed to measure the urban ecosystem health status, grade the health levels, and identify the limiting factors. A case study was conducted on 14 typical Chinese cities along the B&R. The temporal dynamics indicated that the health states of most of these cities gradually improved during the study period. With respect to spatial differences, city types could be ranked from high to low health in the order of coastal innovative and open cities, inland open cities, and open-window cities. Based on further analysis of limiting factors, suggestions to improve the ecosystem health levels of cities along the “B&R” were proposed for the different types of cities.