Research On Ecological Economic Sustainable Development Of Heishui County Based On The Ecological Footprint Model

Along with the development of world economy, a series of environmentalproblems,such as climate warming, resource shortages,has increasingly been thefoundamental factors that impact and impede the economic development of minorityregions. The only option in front of the minority economy is to seek the sustainabledevelopment of ecosystems and economic systems, thus a reasonable index systemmust be found to determine whether a region is in a state of sustainable development.Appeared in1992,the Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA) has been an significanttool measuring sustainable development, with regional ecological deficit andecological surplus been its main determining bases.With the help of ecological footprint model, this paper calculates the ecologicalfootprint, ecological carrying capacity, ecological deficit and surplus of Heishuicounty from2008to2012,based on the data collected from its per capita resourceconsumption and arable land, and biological resources. The results show that from2008to2012, the ecological footprint of Heishui county is on rise year by year withthe per capita footprint rise from0.690416hm2of2008up to1.143881hm2of2012.The ecological capacity is rising in general with local fluctuation:the ecologicalcarrying capacity in2011reached3.179107hm2while it was only2.510828hm2in2009. From the overall situation,the ecological surplus is greater than ecologicaldeficit and the economic and the ecosysem of Heishui county is in a sustainable state.The calculation shows that the ecological footprint droped from0.937056025hm2to0.47399hm2per ten thousand rmb created; the efficency of utilization isgradually rising; the ecosystem diversity is restoring and the allocation of ecologicalfootprint tends to be fair and reasonable with the diversity index of ecologicalfootprint rising from1.00317to1.17974.From the calculation of ecoystem and eco-economic system development ability, theecosystem development ability is higher than eco-economic system on the wholeduring2008to2011, while it is on the contrary in2012. On the part of growth rate,the eco-economic development capacity is faster than that of ecosystem.Based on the ecological and economic sustainable development capacity ofHeishui county,the paper proposed three ideas on: the first one is to strenghtheninvestment in agriculture and pay attention to develop science and technology; secondis to develop eco-industry so as to promote the healthy development of economy; andthe last one is to accelerate economic development by developing eco-tourism.