Provincial Environmental Performance Assessment

The Government and the public attach great importance to environmental protection, because environmental issues relate to everybody's livelihood. With the rapid increase in environmental pollution control investment, people begin to pay more and more attention to the effectiveness of investment. Some of them question the effectiveness because the environmental quality has not been improved significantly.Faced with this question, the Government cannot give a satisfactory reply because of the lack of environmental performance tracking. Regional environmental performance (REP) assessment is an effective tool to quantitatively evaluate the effectiveness of environmental management, to track environmental performance. With the help of REP, it is easy to grasp the gap between current situation and objectives, to understand the progress have been made, and then the Government can answer the question of what is the effectiveness of our investment in environmental protection.The study discussed the evaluation approach for provincial environmental performance (PEP). Based on the literature review, the study established a conceptual framework, a set of indicators and a assessment method for PEP. The constructive issues of our research is as follows:1. The study builds a state-trend(S-T) framework, which is closely related to the connotation of PEP. Then a set of indicators including is proposed under the guidance of the state-trends framework.2. The study establishes an integrated evaluation method based on time series, which aims to truly represent the environmental performance results and reduce the interference from different environmental background.The study investigated a sample of 30 provinces in China, used SPSS16.0 to analyze data, and then radar graphic method, GIS spatial labeling method, scatter method and the K-means clustering analysis method were adopted to analyze the results of the assessment. The main results were as follows: l.In general, provinces of eastern China gained higher environmental performance scores, western and northeast provinces'environmental performances were very poor.2. At the present stage, a single environmental quality indicator cannot be used to characterize environmental performance. There was no significant correlation between environmental performance and environmental quality, but a significant positive correlation between environmental performance and vitality of ecosystem, efficiency of resource utilization, pollution control, infrastructure construction.3.There was a better coordination between economic development and environmental protection in Jiangsu and Guangdong, while Gansu and Guizhou suffered dual severe pressures of economic development and environmental protection.4.There was a significant correlation between economic development level and PEP. But it couldn't be denied that natural resource endowment was also closely related to PEP.