Design of Sustainability Indicators System Based on Ecological Footprint with an Application to Guanzhong Region of China

摘要

Ecological Footprint (EF) provides an estimate of the land area necessary to satisfy current levels of resource consumption for a defined human population. However, a major difficulty associated with the EF is the reliability to measure progress towards the goal of sustainability. In this study, a new indicators system is designed to bring the EF analysis into the scope of sustainability frameworks. That includes Ecological Pressure Index (EFI), Ecological Occupancy Index (EOI), Ecological-economic Coordination Index (EECI) and Sustainable Development Index (SDI). Furthermore, the consequent assessment of these four indices is based on the time series analysis of ecological footprint, Biological Capacity (BC) as well as ecological budget in Guanzhong region for 1991-2010. And we employ the polynomial regression equations to simulate the dynamic laws. The study results indicate: (1) Per capita EF of Guanzhong increased from 0.9621 gha in 1991 to 1.5177 gha in 2010, while per capita BC decreased from 1.3435 gha to 1.2857 gha during the same period, (2) Per capita ecological budget is positive during 1991-2000, indicating an ecological surplus. Whereas, the ecological deficit occurs in 2001, and rise to 0.3120 by 2010, (3) EFI trends up on the whole, with an increment of 63.19%, which explains the local ecosystem is being heavily burdened more with the increased human consumptions, (4) EOI also presents an ascending tendency approximately with an increment of 55.54%, which demonstrates Guanzhong has an increasing human consumption level compared with the global average, (5) EECI fluctuates in the range of 0.4781 to 0.6152, without outstanding changes, which indicates more efforts need to be made toward the reconciliation of local economic progress and ecological conservation and (6) SDI trends reduced after increasing first, which illustrates the regional sustainability does not progress in a steady level in the past 20 years.