An eco-efficiency-based urban sustainability assessment method and its application

Abstract

It is of critical importance to develop appropriate assessment tools with which to comprehensively measure the sustainability status of a region in order to guide its transformation to sustainable development. This paper proposes a novel method of sustainability assessment based on urban eco-efficiency, which calculates the ratios of welfare and ecological impact. This method can demonstrate the relative sustainability status of targeted regions for different time periods, and it implicitly considers comprehensive urban information including ecology, economy and society. By using the human development index (HDI) and ecological footprint (EF) as measures of urban welfare and ecological burden, we carried out a case study of Xiamen City during 2000–2006 using the proposed method. The results indicated that there is a fluctuation of eco-efficiency, which shows a steady increase then a sharp decline, with a marginal increase towards the end of the studied period. Overall, eco-efficiency, resource efficiency and environmental efficiency declined 0.155-, 0.157- and 0.153-times, respectively, during this period. This means that the increase of ecological consumption is faster than improvement of social welfare. As a result, urban sustainability declines, and its future increase depend on improvements of both resource and environment efficiency. Our method proved effective in analysing the relative sustainability status among targeted regions for different time periods, paving the way for practical applications, such as policy analysis, in pursuit of sustainable development.

Keywords:

• city
• eco-efficiency
• sustainability
• human development index
• ecological footprint
• Xiamen

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZCX2-YW-450), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2009DFB90120) and the Bureau of Science and Technology of Xiamen (3502Z20072002).