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Green development and solutions to environmental problems rely on local conditions and green connections between regions during their development. However, it is less understood whether a region's emission of carbon and pollutants is moderate compared to its development. The study proposes the 'green connection of regional development' concept from the consumption perspective to enhance the understanding and measurement of regional capacity towards green development and responsible production and consumption. Data envelopment analysis was performed to evaluate the local and embodied emissions of eight pollutants for 30 provinces in China from 2012 to 2017. Twenty provinces had optimal capacity of green growth within the region and 15 had an optimal green connection of regional development. Suboptimal levels of overall green growth and green connection of regional development efficiencies were due to insufficient pure technical and scale efficiency levels, with a stronger impact of the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different types of poverty traps can reinforce each other, and consequently, multiple traps pose challenges for poverty alleviation, especially in rural areas. There remains a lack of understanding of social and ecological poverty traps and their relationship with one another. We considered the Selinco area in the Tibetan highlands of China and investigated social and ecological poverty, for an understanding of the poverty trap through the land‐human relationship lens. We found that ecological and social poverty differ between various townships due to their poor ecological and social environs. We affirmed reinforcing feedback between ecological and social poverty, and that the relative importance of social and ecological poverty differs at various thresholds. These results advance our understanding of different poverty traps and their feedback process. The findings inform the policy‐making process when addressing the land‐human relationship to improve ecosystem stability and promote social equity to foster sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to deal with anthropogenic environmental impacts are focussed predominantly on cities. This paper applies metafrontier-data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the capacity of 286 Chinese cities of different sizes and in different regions towards green growth development and assesses gaps in their efficiencies. The determinants of efficiency, including regional and population size effects, were estimated using logistic regression model. Results show that the state of green growth efficiency was different for cities of different sizes and from different regions, and gaps existed compared to the best production frontier. The paper suggests that more endeavours are required for environmental and social dimensions, and a short-term target can include achievement of group frontier efficiency and significant reduction in technology gap ratios. Owing to significant population size effect, policy programs should have target plans for cities of different sizes as they differ in performance and capacity building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has come up with ecological civilization as one of major goals to improve its ecological sustainability during development in future. Under this broad framework, social, economic and natural ecosystems are expected to develop in harmony. However, there is lack of evaluation mechanism for this newly proposed strategy. Therefore, in this article, ecosystem services, Ecological Footprint and gross domestic product per capita were selected in order to reflect the resource endowment, human occupation on natural capital, and the economic growth. Thus, an integrated indicator was constructed from the three indexes based on the linear correlation among them, and we provided comprehensive evaluation on ecological civilization construction in the provinces and municipalities in China in 2010. When it comes to the indicator of ecological civilization construction, Hainan province has the greatest value which is 0.5091 and Beijing municipality has the smallest value which is 0.0377. At last, the article analyzed the ecological pressure and efficiency in ecological civilization construction in China. The results contribute to scientific and objective evaluation of regional ecological civilization construction in order to properly make decisions and take actions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The key to studying urban sustainable development depends on quantifying stores, efficiencies of urban metabolisms and capturing urban metabolisms' mechanisms. This paper builds up the metabolic emergy account and quantifies some important concepts of emergy stores. Emphasis is placed on the urban metabolic model based on the slack based model (SBM) method to measure urban metabolic efficiencies. Urban metabolic mechanisms are discussed by using the regression method. By integrating these models, this paper analyzes the urban metabolic development in Beijing from 2001 to 2010. We conclude that the metabolic emergy stores of Beijing increased significantly from 2001 to 2010, with the emergy imported accounting for most of the increase. The metabolic efficiencies in Beijing have improved since the 2008 Olympic Games. The population, economic growth, industrial structures, and environmental governance positively affect the overall urban metabolism, while the land expansion, urbanization and environmentally technical levels hinder the improving of urban metabolic efficiencies. The SBM metabolic method and the regression model based on the emergy analysis provide insights into the urban metabolic efficiencies and the mechanism. They can promote to integrate such concepts into their sustainability analyses and policy decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The human ecosystem is conceptualized into four dimensions: openness, vulnerability, harmony and independence. • Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals complex factors influencing human ecosystems. • The quality of the human ecosystem in the park fluctuated and declined. • The openness of the human ecosystem in the park was far ahead between four dimensions. As one of the most critical ecological functional areas in China and even the world, Sanjiangyuan National Park's sustainable development has attracted attention. The integrated evaluation method, the coupling coordination model, and the grey correlation model were employed to uncover the coupling coordination relationship among sub-systems in the human ecosystem of Sangjiangyuan National Park. The results are as follows. First, the sustainable development capacity of the human ecosystem in Sanjiangyuan National Park fluctuated and declined during the study period, with insufficient momentum for sustainable development. Second, from 2005 to 2020, Sanjiangyuan National Park experienced a process of optimization and adjustment from moderately uncoordinated to nearly uncoordinated. At the county scale, the coupling coordination state of the sub-system was consistent with the overall national park. Third, among the four dimensions, the correlation degree of openness to the human ecosystem of Sanjiangyuan National Park was far ahead, followed by harmony, independence, and vulnerability. Our research can provide a reference for the coordinated development of the human ecosystem in other national parks with similar ecological functions around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban shrinkage is becoming a major global challenge and causing a series of challenges to the sustainable urban development. In this study, a system dynamics-based model was proposed and used to dynamically evaluate the sustainability of the urban development under five different policy scenarios in response to population shrinkage. A model was applied to socioeconomic data from eight shrinking cities in Northeast China from 2002 to 2017 to investigate the past and future trends in their urban development sustainability from 2002 to 2035. The results show that the development sustainability indices of the eight cities increased overall up to 2017. However, some then peaked and are now declining. The model predicts that the cities would vary considerably in their development sustainability across the five different scenarios. For example, with smart shrinkage policies, cities are predicted to sustain their current levels of development sustainability; meanwhile, with anti-shrinkage policies, where growth-oriented development is pursued, some cities are also predicted to see improvements in sustainability. The present study provides a technical approach to simulating and investigating the circular feedback mechanism between components of a city system and effectively correlating population shrinkage with urban development sustainability across different policy responses to urban shrinkage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]