Study On Spatial-Temporal Evolution Of Ecological Footprint In The Process Of China’s Urbanization

Urbanization is the inevitable trend of economic and social development and sustainable development is the guarantee and target of it. Although the rapid development of China’s urbanization brings huge economic and social benefits, but the extensive development cause the resources waste and environmental deterioration, which intensifies the pressure of resources and environment for China’s economic development. To realize the harmonious development of urbanization and ecological environment has become an imminent problem. Ecological footprint measures the amount of resource consumption and waste emissions to economic and social activity based on ecologically productive area, which provides an intuitive and effective way for the study on the influence of urbanization to ecological environment. With the related theory of regional economics, human geography, ecology and other subjects, this paper analysis the inner relationship between urbanization and ecological footprint. And studying the effect of China’s urbanization on ecological footprint based on analyzing the process of China’s urbanization and ecological footprint evolution in order to seek effective way to realize sustainable development of China’s urbanization.Firstly, summarizing the inner relationship of the urbanization and ecological footprint starting from their connotation. Urbanization is the comprehensive social progress including the change of population, economy, regional landscape and lifestyle and its overall development trend is similar to a "S" curve. The urbanization process can be divided into four stages which contains early stage, middle stage, later stage and final stage according to its different levels. With the different economic and social characteristics of four stages, human activities in every stage cause different resource consumption and waste emissions, which making the ecological footprint overall show a trend of "inverted U". Namely, with the development of primary and secondary industry and population’s agglomeration to urban in early and middle stage, resource consumption and waste emissions increase continuously and the ecological footprint goes up gradually. The tertiary industry’s proportion in the national economy rises rapidly and the residents’ awareness of environmental protection is being strengthened constantly in later stage, making a downward trend of the ecological footprint after reaching the peak. In the final stage, the impact of urbanization development on ecological environment has been at a low level, ecological footprint remained steady decline.Secondly, analyzing China’s urbanization process and spatial temporal evolution of ecological footprint respectively. China’s urbanization has experienced a tortuous development process from1949to2013. China’s urbanization trend fluctuates considerably and its rate rises to a very small extent before1978. After China’s reform and opening up, China’s urbanization enters the growth stage and its speed increases significantly. Especially after2000, China’s urbanization rises faster than any previous period and has great influence on urban population size, the mode of economic development, urban regional landscape and urban residents’way of life. At the same time, calculating the ecological footprint of China and30Mainland provinces from2000to2012by emergy ecological footprint model. On the one hand, China’s ecological footprint intensity shows a rising trend of periodic fluctuation in time dimension and shows characteristic of ladder type gradually in spatial evolution process. And high intensity provinces mainly concentrate in the west and northeast China. On the other hand, in the process of spatial-temporal evolution of China’s ecological footprint structure, ecological footprint of fossil fuel land, building land and other energy type land is on the rise, leading to a continue increase of energy dominated provinces and a continue decrease of biological dominated provinces, whose performance in the space is the expanding from the northwest and southeast area to the peripheral area gradually. In addition, the efficiency of ecological footprint of China is on the rise. Although the space distribution gradually forms the pattern of south against north, but the differences are gradually narrowing.Finally, studying spatial effects and threshold effects of China’s urbanization on ecological footprint respectively by using spatial panel model and panel threshold model. It concludes that Chinese urbanization has strong spatial spillover effects on ecological footprint and the increasing of urban population proportion, the expansion of economic scale, the improvement of city traffic level and the transition of urban lifestyle are all important reasons to the rising of ecological footprint. At the same time, the urbanization rate also has obvious threshold effect on the relationship between urbanization and economic development and ecological footprint. Urbanization development will make a gradual decrease of ecological footprint when the urbanization rate reaches72%. While the marginal effect coefficient of economic development on ecological footprint will decline, but it won’t have the negative effects.According to the above analysis, China should fully consider the differences among regions and adjust the development mode to suit its local conditions. China should develop the low energy consumption and low pollution industries in the premise of ensuring the employment of agricultural transfer population. And paying more attention to the training of residents’awareness of environmental protection and speeding up the popularization of green and low-carbon lifestyle, so as to achieve new urbanization for intelligence, intensive, low carbon and green.