A new approach to natural capital sustainable development

ABSTRACT

The three-dimension (3D) ecological footprint makes the analysis of the relationships between the demand and supply of natural capital more credible by importing footprint depth and footprint size. This article used China’s regions as the object to analyze the high-level sustainability of the natural capital from the view of “ecology – efficiency – fairness” multidimensional framework. Research showed that China’s ecological footprint has risen while bio-capacity per capita has descended in recent 20 years. This paper also discusses the spatial distribution of China’s natural capital ecological sustainability, efficiency sustainability and fairness sustainability. Finally, it builds multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) models to get multidimensional sustainability framework taking ecological sustainability, efficiency sustainability, and fairness sustainability into consideration.

KEYWORDS:

• Multidimensional sustainability evaluation
• 3D ecological footprint
• Gini of footprint size
• emergy analysis
• multi-criteria evaluation models

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.