Study On Three Methods Of Regional Sustainable Development Assessment

Sustainable development is widely accepted as a new development theory and developing mode in the world. Despite its connotation and extension is deeply understood, but key steps and measures about how to realize sustainable development are not so clear due to its complexity as a system engineering, in which one point is prominent that is how to value and assess level of sustainable development for a particular region. Currently, there are many methods to quantitatively evaluate sustainability which can be categorized into two classes: assessment models from some a specialty and assessment models from a systemic viewpoint.Assessment models from some a specialty can be classified into ecology assessment models, economics assessment models and sociology assessment models. Ecology assessment models attache much importance to whether human beings'activity surpass the carrying capability of ecosystem, but ecological footprint only reflects the situations of ecosystem in the past and current time and nothing for the future, and it only reflects the influence of economic policy on environment but neglects the other import factors on land use such as urbanization, land degradation due to pollution, and erosion. Economics assessment models try to value population, society, resources, environment and over-loss of resources and pollution of environment into money, but it has many disadvantages. First, market price can not really reflect the scarcity of resources. Second, it can't be popularized due to imperfect accounting and statistics institution and un-established statistical criterion. Sociology assessment model refers to HDI, but HDI also has many flaws. First,...