Search

The production of services and goods needs consumption of available material and energy. An economy often focuses on sources of high-quality material/energy first produced by nature for increasing growth. World heritages sites (WHSs) have become major tourist attractions that promote economic development for developing countries. The increased number of tourists has thus brought about threats to ecological environment. Scholars stress that it should be sustainable or "green growth" since it comes to economic growth currently. The aim of this research is to establish a sustainable development model for WHSs to empirically investigate the dilemma between economic development and ecological protection with particular emphasis on strategies that promote the sustainability. The study took China's 45 WHSs as samples and constructed a two-stage sustainable development model to analyze the trade-off between economic development and ecological protection. The dynamic network slacks-based measure was employed for dynamic performance evaluation for the period 2013-2019. The results suggest that a strong balance between economic development and ecological protection would be essential for sustainability. Spearman's rank correlation was also used to verify that there are no conflicts between the two processes. In addition, this study demonstrates that an effective government policy covering regulations of economic development and ecological protection can positively influence sustainable development. The governments are suggested to improve the section that the WHS performs inefficient. Involvement of balanceable sustainable development for WHSs needs necessary cooperation during concerned institutions, practitioners, and communities. The WHSs are recommended to receive strict standard of supervision, management, and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in September 2015, provided a global development agenda for all countries to use as a blueprint for progress on economic, social, and environmental sustainability. There are 17 Goals, 169 Targets and 230+ Indicators in SDGs, which specifically depends on multi-source data for monitoring and reporting on progress towards the associated targets and indicators. The existing evaluation methods are mainly based on statistic and survey data with lower spatiotemporal resolution, longer evaluation cycle, and higher cost. To monitor indicators of the SDGs quickly and accurately, it required us to explore new data sources and technology. In this paper, firstly, we reviewed comprehensively all indicators information (concepts and definitions, computation method, and data sources) in three Goals (SDG6, SDG11, and SDG15). Then, we analyzed the feasibility of monitoring accurately and quickly the above indicators on basis of available multi-source data (statistics, remote sensing, ground-based observations and internet data). Finally, a series of integration methods are developed to monitor several specific indicators with multi-source data. The methodology of this study provided experience for monitoring SDGs indicators in developing countries and filled the gap for the assessment of SDGs indicators at fine scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]