Multi-Scale Assessment Of Sustainable Well-Being In China

Sustainable development is regarded as one of the most challenging and fuzzy contemporary paradigms.There is a natural affinity and consistency between humanland relationship and the ultimate question of “what to sustain and what to develop”.The ultimate goal of sustainable development is to improve human well-being.The three pillars of sustainable development,namely,economy,society and environment,also have a significant impact on human well-being.The intensive disturbance of human activities to the earth system has caused the debate in the new geological era of the Anthropocene.At present,the unsustainable use of natural resources on a global scale is not only harmful to environmental conditions,basic ecosystem services and biodiversity,but also to human health and the well-being of present and future generations.In the past,the evaluation of sustainable development focused on the measurement of objective well-being,relatively less on the impact and role of subjective well-being.Based on the sustainable development theory,welfare geography,Welfare Triangle theory,complex system theory and human-land relationship theory,this paper focuses on sustainable development evaluation from the perspective of human well-being.This paper puts forward a new concept of sustainable well-being.Firstly,it constructs a "dual core"(well-being state and well-being environment)model framework of subjective sustainable well-being on the micro scale,and puts forward a "diamond" evaluation model of subjective sustainable well-being.Using structural equation model,it analyzes the Chinese residents’ subjective sustainable well-being and its influencing factors from the cross-section and vertical aspects.Based on this,the "bottom-up" hierarchical weighting method is used to integrate the subjective sustainable well-being of the micro scale into the macro scale,so as to obtain the subjective sustainable well-being state of the macro scale and the level value of the well-being environment.The objective sustainable well-being is measured by constructing green human development index.Then,on the macro scale,the temporal change rate and spatial pattern of subjective and objective sustainable well-being are compared and analyzed.Finally,the paper analyzes the sustainable well-being efficiency and its temporal and spatial changes in 25 regions of China by using the network DEA.It is found that social status,income level and life satisfaction contribute the most to the level of subjective sustainable well-being on the micro scale,while employment,education,housing and medical security contribute the most to the level of subjective sustainable well-being environment;from the perspective of longitudinal changes in well-being status and well-being environment,both of them have Matthew effect.As far as the influencing factors are concerned,at the level of individual characteristics,there are significant differences in the level of well-being between married and unmarried population and between urban and rural population;there are very significant differences in the level of well-being environment between different age groups and populations with different levels of education;the increase of income will have a negative impact on the level of well-being,but have a weak impact on the level of wellbeing environment.The change of social capital will have a positive impact on the level of well-being.On the macro scale,the evaluation level of subjective sustainable wellbeing of 25 regions in China from 2012 to 2018 shows a trend of gradual improvement on the whole,but the evaluation level of sustainable well-being environment shows a trend of decline on the whole.The spatial distribution of subjective sustainable wellbeing is discrete,and the spatial difference of well-being environment is greater than that of well-being state.The spatial pattern of objective sustainable well-being has been transformed from the East,middle and West differences in 2012 to the North-South differences in 2018.Through the comparison of subjective and objective sustainable well-being,it is found that there is a macro dislocation phenomenon between subjective and objective sustainable well-being,that is,in the areas with high level of objective sustainable well-being,the subjective sustainable well-being is relatively low,and there is a trade-off relationship between subjective and objective sustainable well-being on the macro scale,and the objective performance and subjective perception of sustainable well-being.There is no synergy between them.The sustainable well-being efficiency values of 25 regions in China are not high on the whole and show a downward trend on the whole.Their spatial distribution is characterized by discretization,and the spatial center of gravity gradually moves from west to East.