The Research Of Anhui Province’s Ecological Footprint And Sustainable Development

In recent years, while making brilliant achievements of industrialization and urbanization, Anhui province is facing increasingly serious environment problems such as water pollution and air pollution. In order to promote economic and social development in harmony with population, resources and environment, Anhui province came up with the strategic objectives that building ’Ecological Province’ and ’Wonderful Anhui’ in the Ninth Party Congress.’The Twelfth Five-Year Environment Protection Guideline of Anhui Province’ requires that Anhui should enhance its environmental carrying capacity and take the road of sustainable development,. so this article makes comprehensive analysis of Anhui’s per capita ecological footprint account and its sustainable development situation based on the ecological footprint theory.First of all, after combing the related concepts and researches of ecological footprint, this paper calculates Anhui’s per capita ecological footprint account between1995and2011based on the variable world production method and time series data, the results show that Anhui province’s per capita ecological footprint increased from1.02hectares to2.24hectares; Compared with the per capita ecological footprint, Anhui province’s per capita ecological carrying capacity only increased from0.478hectares to0.663hectares. The rapid rise of per capita ecological footprint conduced Anhui province’s per capita ecological deficit increased from0.54hectares to1.58hectares. Specifically, in terms of ecological footprint, in addition to arable land’s per capita ecological footprint decreased slightly, there were substantial rise of Anhui province’s fossil energy land, building land, pasture, woodland and water’s per capita ecological footprint. In terms of ecological carrying capacity, in addition to a slight decline appeared in per capita ecological carrying capacity of water, the ecological carrying capacity of arable land, pasture, woodland and building land’s per capita ecological carrying capacity all increased. In terms of ecological deficit, besides arable land and building land were in ecological surplus situation; its pasture, woodland, water and fossil energy land were all in ecological deficit situation and their per capita ecological deficit increased from0.014hectares,0.004hectares,0.046hectares,0.527hectares in1995to0.089hectares,0.019hectares,0.119hectares,1.48hectares in2011respectively.Secondly, this paper uses ten thousand Yuan’s ecological footprint, ecological footprint diversity index, population deficit evaluating the efficiency of resource utilization, the rationality of consumption structure and the population overload degree of Anhui province. In terms of the efficiency of resource utilization, although Anhui’s resource utilization efficiency is increasing, but compared to China, Jiangsu province and Zhejiang province, its resource utilization efficiency is relatively low. In terms of consumption structure rationality, the rapid increase of fossil energy footprint leads to the reasonableness of Anhui province’s consumption structure continues to decrease. In terms of population overload degree, the rapid rise of per capita ecological footprint leads to Anhui province’s moderate population size declining. The population deficit and demographic overload problem of Anhui province is becoming worse and worse.In addition, this article analyses the driving factors of Anhui province’s per capita ecological footprint by using STIRPAT model, and gets the results that the energy consumption of per unit GDP has a little impact on Anhui province’s per capita ecological footprint; Anhui province’s per capita ecological footprint is mainly effected by the ratio of secondary industry in GDP, per capita consumption expenditure and positively correlate with them.Finally, based on the research conclusions, this article comes up with policy recommendations from improving ecological carrying capacity, optimizing the industrial structure, reducing fossil energy consumption, controlling the population size and promoting rational consumption, bringing the ecological footprint account into government evaluation system, and looks into the future research.