A Study On Urban Sustainability Assessment Based On MSIASM

In the early 1980s, the brewing and emerging of the concept of sustainable development known as the epoch-making event in the history of human society, have been of great concern around the world. In the following 10 years, the concept of sustainable development was identified by international communities and integrated into national development initiatives as the guide and basic strategy which instructed the development of the countries. Cities played critical role in national development and the research on their sustainability became a hot issue. There are two kinds of models that usually be used by domestic and foreign scholars in urban sustainability research: 1. Comprehensive evaluation model based on multi-level indicators. This model sets up certain indicator system, processes every value of indicators through proper mathematics model, then gets assessment result. 2. Demand-Supply model. This model usually compares the relationship between ecological footprint and ecological carrying capacity and then analyzes the trend of regional sustainability. Each model has its own defects: the first one thinks a little bit less about material and energy flow within social departments, but pays more attention to the mathematical processes; the second one is not comprehensive enough to analyze the sustainable issue of the whole system. It transforms all the consumption of human activities to just one indicator-"land use".Because of the defects of these two methods, this dissertation analyzes urban sustainability from a societal metabolism perspective using Multiple Scale Integrated Assessment of Societal Metabolism (MSIASM). This method analyzes all the energy and added value throughput within urban-industrial eco-system integrating human activities, exosomatic energy throughput and added value throughput. Besides, in the application of our predecessors, this method just contained exosomatic energy input in each department, but the output was not mentioned. So, we add another series of parameters to show the output of metabolism. The metabolite is expressed by greenhouse gas emission. At the exosomatic energy input end, we also put forward a parameter NPPR using the related knowledge of natural eco-system for reference.Then, this dissertation validates the application of MSIASM using real data. Through time series analysis to some parameters, it identifies the overall sustainability of Dalian and provides two policy recommendations.This research shows that MSIASM could be very useful on urban sustainability analysis. It integrates multi-disciplinary knowledge and provides scientific interpreting about the status of the sustainability of urban-industrial eco-system from multiple scales.