The Research Of Evaluation Of Green Development Level And The Influencing Factors In Arid Ecologically Vulnerable Areas In Northwest China

The arid ecologically vulnerable areas in the northwest China have poor natural conditions,extreme shortage of water resources,frequent sandstorm activities,serious desertification,and extremely weak anti-interference ability of ecosystems.Moreover,the economic development of the region is slow and belongs to the main distribution area of the poor population.Therefore,it faces the three tasks of"revitalizing development,tackling poverty and tackling the ecological protection".Ningxia province is a typical area of the mentioned areas above.The soil erosion in the south,desertification in the central,water pollution along the Yellow River wetlands,and soil pollution in the Yellow River Irrigation District in the north,all restrict the sustainable economic and social development of the region,and the task of poverty alleviation remains arduous.By taking Ningxia as a research area to study its green development level and the influencing factors,this study aims at proposing valuable policy recommendations for promoting the coordinated development of economic development and ecological protection in the arid ecologically fragile areas in Northwest China and the early completion of the task of poverty alleviation.In this study,we exploit the entropy method,Tobit model,Tapio decoupling model,combined with Stata15.0 software and ArcGIS 10.6 to conduct the time and space evaluations of Ningxia's green development level,and analyze the influencing factors.Firstly,the Ningxia green development evaluation index system is constructed considering the three aspects of economic growth greening,resource and environmental carrying capacity and government policy support,and the index data of Ningxia's green development in 2008-2017 is collected.Furthermore,the characteristics and trends of the 10-year green development level are evaluated and it is found that the green development level of Ningxia shows a gradually increasing trend between 2008 and 2017,while with a low water resources and energy utilization rate,high level use of pesticides and fertilizers and low efficiency of environmental protection investment,all of which are reasons restricting the green development.Secondly,the ArcGIS10.6 software is applied to further analyze the spatial difference of green development level in different cities of Ningxia.According to the evaluation and analysis of the green development level of Ningxia,several problems in the process of green development are pointed out as followed:(1)The resource utilization efficiency of Ningxia increased significantly in 2008-2017,but it was still the lowest among the five northwestern provinces;(2)The per capita industrial waste gas emissions in Ningxia increased significantly during 2008-2017;(3)The use of agricultural fertilizers and pesticides was much higher than that of other provinces in the five northwestern provinces;(4)The efficiency of environmental protection investment of Ningxia was very low.In addition,this study uses the Tobit model to analyze the factors affecting the level of green development,and uses the Tapio decoupling model to determine the decoupling state of Ningxia's economic growth and green development.Through research and analysis of influencing factors,it is found that narrowing the income gap between urban and rural residents,expanding international trade,reducing the output value of the secondary industry to the regional GDP,and appropriately increasing the population density of the whole region are conducive to raising the level of green development.And it is not conducive to the improvement of the green development with a high level urbanization rate.The decoupling model further demonstrates that the green development level of Ningxia has improved in 2008-2017,and the decoupling state between green development and economic growth has changed from the original negative decoupling to the current weak decoupling state,indicating that the government should pay more attention to coordinate the relationship between economic growth and ecological protection.Finally,according to the above research,this study puts forward three policy recommendations:Firstly,optimize the industrial structure to promote economic development in the Northwest Arid Ecologically Vulnerable Area;Second,promote the coordinated development of ecological protection and economic growth;Third,strengthen both ecological protection and precise poverty alleviation.