Provincial Environmental Performance Evaluation Under The Requirement Of Ecological Civilization In China

China has experienced high-speed development and has achieved significant socio-economic development in recent years. However this growth is placing pressure on natural environment prominently, such as environmental pollution, ecological degradation, and shortage of resources. Although Chinese government has increased the investment in environmental protection, the situation is not improved ideally. The disproportion of governance effect and huge investment caused criticism of the public. Environmental Performance Evaluation can track the environmental protection output, review the environmental performance, and optimize government decision-making. By applying appropriate indicators, Environmental Performance Evaluation can periodically evaluate the environmental performance of the environmental policy, scientific and quantitative evaluate the effectiveness of the environmental protection investment and environmental management efficiency, analysis the realization degree of environment objective, present the overall change tendency of environmental policy, and guide the healthy development of environmental policy. Integrating ecological civilization consideration into the performance evaluation index system can promote China’s ecological civilization construction. The integration is not only the fundamental request for regional environmental performance evaluation, but also the inevitable requirement to realize the "Harmonious Society" and "Beautiful China".As a new tool, the regional Environmental Performance Evaluation faces with many problems and challenges. Based on the theoretical analysis and case study of Environmental Performance Evaluation, this paper integrated ecological civilization concept into the assessment framework of provincial environmental performance evaluation in China. The provincial environmental performance evaluation index system was established based on the requirement of ecological civilization construction. Furthermore, an empirical study was carried out on the dynamic assessment of environmental performance for China’s30provinces and cities from 2007to2011.In this paper, the theme framework and the DPSIR framework model were used to build provincial environmental performance dynamic evaluation index system, which is constructed by4second class indexes (environmental health, ecological protection, resources sustainable use, environmental governance),14third class indexes, and27fourth class indexes. Target incremental method was applied to conduct data standard processing, and historical comparison method was applied to revise the results and make up the inadequacy of policy target, then this paper used the Delphi method to assign weights for the indicators, used the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) to show management ability for mitigating environmental degradation and improving environmental condition, used SPSS to conduct correlation analysis of Chinese provincial regional environmental performance and local economic level, and finally, this paper used rendering classification method to analyze calculation results and evaluate the dynamic change trend of China’s30provinces environmental performance index from2007to2011.The main conclusions were shown as follows:a) Chinese provincial EPI has certain volatility and regional differences. The comprehensive performance of eastern region is superior to the central and western regions. From a five-year view, eastern, central, and western regions show no significant improvement trend, b) Through the correlation analysis, China’s regional environmental performance EPI shows significant positive correlation with GDP and per capita GDP. Environmental performance is affected by social and economic development level significantly. For example, eastern region has a relatively high economic level, and the corresponding environmental performance level is better. The improvement of social economy in central region will not affect environmental performance level much at all, but the ecological protection index, resources sustainable use index, and environmental governance index will increase with social and economic development. In the western region, environmental performance level increases with social and economic development.Provincial Environmental Performance Evaluation research was firstly comprehensively carried out in this paper. Chinese provincial environmental performance evaluation index system was built based on the requirement of ecological civilization. Scientific and dynamic technical framework of Environmental Performance Evaluation was established. Over all, his research could enrich the theory and method of environmental performance evaluation. The author to some extent developed new ideas for the development of Chinese Environmental Performance Evaluation research, and provided scientific and technical support for the promotion and improvement of Chinese Environmental Performance Evaluation.