Study On The Evaluation Of Sustainable Development Of Forestry In Shaanxi Province

Shaanxi Province, which has a long history as well as rich products, is the birthplace ofthe Chinese nation. There were thick forests covering this land of more than two hundredthousand kilometers. The forest is the precious natural resource for Shaanxi Province, it hasgreat significance in economic construction and the improvement of people’s livelihood,especially in the following aspects, such as climate regulation, water and soil conservation,windbreak and sand-fixation, soil improvement, environmental protection, ecological balanceand the safeguard of living environment of mankind. Located in the middle of ShaanxiProvince and the rim of Weibei plateau, Yongshou County is an important ecological district,takes the vital part in the environmental construction of Shaanxi Province as well. Hence, it isof great significance to consider the case of Yongshou County as an example to study thesustainable development of forestry in Shaanxi Province.The evaluation indexes which are determined by Delphi Technique, theory analysismethod, method of frequency analysis and SSMII, form the comprehensive evaluation indexsystem. The study proposes the design approaches and results of the sustainable developmentevaluation index system of forestry in Shaanxi Province. The index system consists of fourlevels: the overall level (1index), the level of comprehensive evaluation index (4indexes),the level of projects evaluation (10indexes) and the level of subprojects evaluation (63indexes). Combining this index system with the district characteristic of Yongshou Countyand its current status of forestry development, three different evaluation methods are chosenaccording to the index weight based on entropy method. These three different evaluationmethods of traditional AHP, AHP based on the combined weight and F-AHP based on AHPare employed in the evaluation of the sustainable development of forestry in YongshouCounty.The results show that the evaluation scores based on these three different evaluationmethods are respectively15.475(AHP),60.991(AHP based on the combined weight) and64.576(F-AHP based on AHP). The first score reveals the underdevelopment status of thesustainable development of forestry in Yongshou County. However, the other two scoressuggest the current transitional period of that. Comparing these three methods, the evaluation based on AHP is obtained through the systemization of subjective information, its indexweights are also determined by experts or the author of this essay according to theirexperience which ignores objective information and would inevitably lead to biased results. Indespite of different evaluation scores, the results of the other two methods both suggest thetransitional period for the sustainable development of forestry in Yongshou County. What’smore, with the consideration of both subjective and objective information, the index weightsof these two methods are closer to the real situation. Considering the above reasons, the studyadopts the results that the sustainable development level of the forestry in Yongshou County isexperiencing a transitional period, and explores the strategies for the sustainable developmentof forestry in Shaanxi Province.