Shandong Peninsula Coastal Capacity For Sustainable Development Evaluation

After the industrial revolution, more wealth has been created and the social productivity has been developed into a higher level. Meanwhile, the earth's environment has been destroyed seriously so that the earth and human being could not endure long. This crisis represents on population expanding, energy crisis, environment pollution, ecology damage and so on. Based on these actualities, the concept of sustainable development has been brought forward. The main signification is that the social development should not only meet the nowadays needs but also reserve enough resources for our offspring. The concept of sustainable development is an innovation to the normal understanding of social development.The county economy is a basic hierarchy and an important part of the whole national economy. It is the junction of city economy, country economy, industrial economy, agricultural economy, macro-economy and micro-economy. The sustainable development of the county economy is a question which is needed to deal with. In this thesis, we take an inshore city in Shandong Province—Zhaoyuan as an example to research the sustainable development of the county economy. After the reformation, the economy of Zhaoyuan City has been greatly developed and keeping a high increasing speed. Along with the change of society and economy, the factors of the conditionality of them will grow slowly. For this reason, we should establish relevant strategy in order to keep sustainable development. Recently, there are few researches on the sustainable development of the county level. There are three methods for measuring sustainable development internationally. The first one is an indicator system based on the systematic theory and methodology, the second one is based on evaluating the environment in the form of money, and the third one is weighed by ecological footprint. In this thesis, we use these three methods to measure the status of sustainable development in Zhaoyuan City.The method of systematic analysis is the representation to the first method. The durative of economy, ecology and society is the basic element of sustainable development, so the basic configuration of indicator system should consist of 4 parts, which are economy, society, resource, environment and development potential. Each part is made up of more detailed groups, and each group is made up of a set of indicators. Each indicator is relatively unattached, but makes a whole system. After ascertaining each evaluating indicator, we use the method of Delphi and AHP to make sure the proportion of the indicator system. Based on the disposal of the single indicators and the usual evaluating method, we can get the general index of Zhaoyuan City from 1993 to 2002, from 60.73 to 76.13, with the average 68.92. From the result, we can see that it is in the step of sustainable development, and the four aspects in the indicator system in Zhaoyuan City are in a high level of harmony, with the harmony index from 86 to 92.5. Every condition is outstanding, especially the rapid development of economy. The ability of sustainable development is very strong. With the hypothesis that the increasing speed of each indicator remains the same as before, Zhaoyuan will achieve the goal of comprehensive well-off society in 2016.Genuine saving is the representative method of economic measures. The formula is GNP subtracting public and private consumption. Net saving is total gross saving subtracting the depreciate value of the total assets, which is the first step towards a sustainable indicator. In addition to total assets, measures of genuine saving address a much broader concept of sustainability, by valuing changes in natural resource and environmental quality. After collecting data we need in different ways, we calculate the genuine saving rate in Zhaoyuan City. According to the calculation, we can see that the genuine saving of Zhaoyuan keeps the same increasing trends with the increase of GDP, but with the different increasing speed. As a whole, the genuine saving rate of Zhaoyuan shows a fluctuating decline, after achieving the climax in 1993. When it turns to the resource depletion and environment pollution, the case seems different. Theresource depletion shows a great fluctuant change, while the pollution loss shows a relative gentle change. Compared with the genuine saving rate of Yantai and China, the genuine saving rate of Zhaoyuan gets higher score, with the genuine saving rate fluctuates from 36% to 50.8% and the average of the genuine saving rate is 40.5%. At the last, with above analysis, we draw a conclusion that the genuine saving rate of Zhaoyuan City is always in a high level and the loss of pollution and resource takes a less ratio of GDP. So the city has a strong capacity towards sustainable development, with the capacity of sustainable development fluctuating.Ecological footprint is the third method. It converts resources that everyone expended to some land areas. Based on the dispersion between carrying capacity and whole requirement, it can reflect the actuality of the global ecological environment. Through calculating, it shows that the carrying capacity we can utilize each year changed a little, and it puts up the trend of digressive. Meanwhile, the ecological footprint is gradually expanded each year. So the ecology is in the red area, and the capacity of sustainable development is weaken slowly. After collecting the interrelated data, we get the average ecological footprint requirement and average ecological footprint capacity in Zhaoyuan. Then we takes an meticulous analysis of its subdirectories, such as cropland, grassland, water area and so on, and at the same time, compare has been completed between the ecological requirement and the ecological capacity. According to above analysis, we can see that the ecological footprint capacity of Zhaoyuan shows a gentle fluctuate trends, and, as a whole, shows a decline year by year, with the average about 0.4 ha. But the changes of ecological footprint requirement seems different, with the index increasing year by year from 0.65 ha to 0.87 ha, while the ecological footprint deficit increase from 0.26ha to 0.49ha. Above all, the ability towards sustainable development looks relatively pessimistic. The index GDP/EF has the implication of application efficiency of resource, and Zhaoyuan does better with the index increasing year by year .Compared with the index GDP/EF in developed countries, the index of Zhaoyuan has more to do with the application efficiency of resource.In this paper, we compared the three methods in two facets. One is the level of theory. We use the same standard to analysis the three methods. We generalize from the commonness and compare advantage and disadvantage from the individuality. After the analysis under the same standard, we can draw a conclusion that when describing the indicators such as policy pertinence, feasibility and maneuverability, three methods show no prominent difference. Among the three, systemic method is better, with the advantages such as more feasible describing aspects, stronger describing ability, disposer of manual effect in capitalizing and more practical ability, and so on. But at the same time, it did have some disadvantages, such as the difficulty to choose indicators, more subjective actions and so on. Genuine saving method emphasizes the interaction and its attribute among the different subdirectories, which makes it a dynamic method easy to be taken for reference and to describe the ability of sustainable development. Also it absolutely has some disadvantages, such as the vulnerability in describing the exiguous resource and the equality among different capitals. Ecological foot print is the present method of biological physics methods, and it does describe the actual dispersion between the need and the supply, which make it a method prone to be applied into the inspection of sustainable development ability. Every coin has its other sides, and the disadvantages of footprint method are as follows: difficulty for the collection of data, errors in the progress of calculating, lack of the ability for predicting and so on. The next is the level of practice. Through each method we can get one result, and the result is different from each other. The reason for the difference is that ecological footprint is a biological physics method, which is lack of the ability describing the knowledge and culture components of the whole society system, and genuine saving is a method of capitalizing, which is easy to make mistaking through the progress of capitalizing and is difficult to describe the ideological components. By comparing, we can see that three methods could describe the ability of sustainable development from different views, and at the same time, every method has its deficiency when describing the ability ofsustainable development of Zhaoyuan. Among the three, we prefer the systemic method to be the better feasible method describing the ability of sustainable development, for its sensitivity to the components, such as economy, society, resource and environment, and its divinable ability for the changes of different components. Therefore, we select the systemic method as the main method for application, while other two selected for complement.From the results we can see, there are some restrictive factors of economy and society in Zhaoyuan City such as the lack of energy and water resource, the relative higher loss of water and land, the lack of the diversity of the framework of GDP, the lack of scientific personnel and so on. According to the specification of the restrictive factors, we develop the specification to the extension of coastal counties, with the same analysis, and we get the restrictive factors as follows: the comparability in economic framework, the deterioration of environment, the lack of resource and so on. According to these situations, we bring forward some countermeasures in order to keep sustainable development in Zhaoyuan City, which are shown as follows: First, it is pressing to constitute the system of clear product, popularize the theory of circular economy and put it into practice. Also it is pressing to popularize the application of ecological agriculture, constitute the abstemious ecological industry system and propagandize the theory of environment protection and sustainable development which will benefit for the application efficiency of the resources, the diversity of the GDP contributors and the decrease of the cost in product. Second, it is important to reinforce and emphasize the task of environment protection and the amelioration of the cantonal environment. Also it is very important to develop the industry of environment protection and popularize the theory of sustainable development and environment protection, which will be benefit for the amelioration of the cantonal environment and harmonious between human being and nature. Third, it is important to protect the natural resources, as the result of which we can get the higher economic benefit at the expense of less resource depletion and environment pollution.Fourth, it is necessary to accelerate the elementary construct and enhance the modernization of the city, with the high standard orientation, layout and management, towards to the goal of embodiment of "China gold city" in the progress of introducing the mechanism of market economy. Fifth, it is necessary to accelerate the conversion of government function and set up feasible scientific decision-making and evaluate system for the genuine development of the coastal county, toward the goal of sustainable development.