| The "Three River" region is in the middle of the Yarlungzangbo, Lhasa and Nyangqu rivers basin which locate in the third polar of the world—the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. The region is the politic, economic and culture center of Tibet, and also is one of the key development zones which began from the eighth "Five-Year Plan" period. Thus, it is of great importance to research on the sustainability of this region. By doing this, we can increase acknowledge on its development trend as well as its current situation, seek for theoretical foundations of development modes which could balance the ecological and economic benefits. What’s more, this study could promote researches on the Tibetan eco-economic system and researches on the sustainability of middle latitude—high elevation areas.This paper is based on the foundation of former researches of sustainability assessment. Research scale, complexity, allsidedness and data availability are considered together to decide the research contents and methods. Sustainability evaluation using indicators (SEI) based on emergy method (Em) makes the index more targeted and available in the research area, thus it is chosen to be the method using in this paper.The evaluation steps are as follow. First, draw an energy flow diagram which contents the boundary and components of the system, and the sources and flow directions of energy. Second, input and output emergy data and aggregative emergy indicators are calculated. In the third step, SEI based on emergy method is used to evaluate the region’s sustainability. The index system has a hierarchical structure which has3layers:the destination layer, the datum layer and the indicator layer. Indicator weights are decided by AHP method. Finally, the indexes of sustainability (SI) are gotten by the sum of weighted scores, and indexes of different countries are compared.The results show that the SI in Lhasa, Shannan and Xigaze are1.234,0.749and0.937, the gaps of SI are quite small and the Lhasa’s score slightly is higher than the other two regions. The development level of the economic, social and natural subsystem are balanced, the average score of SIe, SIs, and SIn are0.324,0.320and0.329. Specifically, SIe of the18countries are quite closer, and the SIe is of high correlation with the economic development level; gaps of the SIs are slightly larger, the result of Lhasa is much higher than that in other countries; evaluation results distribution of SIn are significantly different from SIe and SIs. What’s more, a spatial distribution phenomenon is showed. The radioactive distribution of SI is like a ring in which the Chengguan District is the pole. The SI is gradually decreased from the inside pole. This phenomenon proves that different countries make have geographical interaction on their neighbors. The high scored countries often surrounded by high scored neighbors, thus it is possible to promoting one country’s development by using targeted methods which considers its the economic, social and natural conditions, and let this country’s development to stimulate its surrounding areas.Based on the sustainability performances results, the18countries are divided into three kinds of zones:the core development zone, the intensive development and the potential development zone. Also, four principles are listed for development:to protect the ecological environment, to increase the scales, to change the structure and to promote systems coupling. Further planning is given under these principles. Taking the characteristics of each zone into consider, several develop modes are designed for the research area, such as the industry chain of stockbreeding—planting—processing industry, and stockbreeding—grain processing industry, etc.The last part of this paper summarizes the main conclusions. What’s more, there also is a sector of discussion in this part, which discusses the creativeness and weakness of data and methods in this paper, and gives an outlook to future research. |
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