Assessments Of Sustainable Development Of County-level Region On The Basis Of Ecological Footprint Model

As a most important part of national socio-economic system, sustainable development of county-level region is the basis of realization of national sustainable development. Ecological Footprint is a useful indicator for measuring the pressure imposed by humanity on natural capital and also a powerful indicator for regional sustainability.The Ecological Footprint (EF) is a measure of how much biologically productive land and water area which an individual, a country, a region or world requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb the wastes it generates, using prevailing technology and resource management schemes. The EF accounts are divided into two parts: the ecological supply of biologically productive areas (or Biological Capacity, BC) and the demand for nature (or Ecological Footprint). Through applying equivalence factors and yield factors to the actual areas in hectares of different land types, the EF calculations normalize biologically productive areas in "global hectares"(world average productivity) across regions and area types. Thus we can aggregate the EF into one number: the biologically productive areas (expressed in global hectares) required by a given population, and so does the BC. Then by comparing the adjusted EF with the adjusted BC, whether there is ecological deficit or not can be find. So the status of a given region's development can be quantitatively assessed, In consideration of the situation, this study attempts to assess sustainable development of county-level region on the basis of Ecological Footprint Model.In this study, the EF and BC of Aluke'rqin Banner were calculated and compared according to the time-trend data from 1982 to 2003. The results showed that: (1)The ecological footprint per person grew by about 400 percent from 1982 to 2003, amounted to 4.047hm2 (global hectares) in 2003, and the county faced the ecological deficit of 1.473 hm2 in 2003, but in 1982 there was an ecological reserve of 0.582 hm2. (2)The county possessed relatively potential capacity and its BC per person increased from 1.771hm2 in 1982 to 2.574hm2 in 2003. (3)And by comparing the results of EF calculations of Aluke'rqin Banner with that of other regions such as China and its provinces, the status of development of Aluke'rqin Banner has been significantly in low-level. ?There existed structural malposition between demand for EF and nature's supply (BC); bioproductivity of pasture and forest were low but their actual areas were large, and the area of built-up land was relatively large. Additively, the study also calculated ecological footprint's diversity and development capacity of Aluke'rqin Banner based on the results of EF calculations; and then analyzed the correlations between ecological footprint's diversity and ecological footprints per 104yuan (GDP), development capacity and yuan (GDP) per person. The study clearly demonstrates that indicator of development capacity based on ecological footprint is a good tool to assess the status of a region's development and that increasing ecological footprint's diversity would increase the benefits of resources utilization and enhance development capacity.Compared with other domestic studies about EF, the significant characters of this study are as follows: firstly apply EF model to assess county-level regional sustainability; in order to correct the static faults of EF Model, study adopted time-trend data (1982~2003) to calculate EF and got good results. Furthermore, the study systematically analyzed the overall Ecological Footprint Model, and discussed the further studies on applying EF model to assess sustainable development of county-level region.