Quantitative investigation of the interactive coupling relationship between urbanization and eco-environment

Abstract

Over the past three decades, China忆s gradual transition toward an urbanization-oriented development strategy has generated a spectacular urbanization development with an average annual growth rate at 0.93%. Although, China achieved a great success in urbanization process, many serious challenges appeared at the same time, such as, population explosion, resources scarcity, and eco鄄environmental deterioration. Accordingly, China忆s rapid urbanization has been characterized by high鄄speed economic growth and a series of environmental issues. As it is widely known that there exists an extremely complex interactive coupling and coercing relationship between urbanization and eco鄄environment, which indicates that urbanization has a strong coercing effect on eco鄄environment, and eco鄄environment has a lagged constraint force on urbanization. How to realize the coordinated development of urbanization and eco鄄environment is not only the key issue in the world economic and social development, but also a hot topic in domestic research in recent years. To start with, this paper establishes a comprehensive index system for assessment of the level of urbanization based on four aspects ( population

Coupling and metabolic analysis of urbanization and environment between two resource-based cities in North China

“…However, in some respects, urbanization and the environment were not well coordinated. By comparison, the coordination degree of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region accelerated from mildly to well-coordinated in the same period (Wang, Fang & Wang, 2015). Compared with the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, where plenty of external resources are always input, the improvement of the coupling coordination degree in the Dongying-Binzhou urban area depends on the transformation and upgrading of the production mode.…”

“…The local coupling process of urbanization and environment provides the necessary resource base for the development of urban regions, while external factors in the external coupling process further provide materials, energy, labor, and investment (Liu et al, 2015; Sun & Architecture, 2016). Changes in the proportion of internal and external resources lead to constant changes in the coupling relationship between urbanization and regional environment (Wang, Fang & Wang, 2015). In the coupling procedure, the environment provides the necessary resource guarantee for the process of urbanization, which causes problems such as land loss, over-population, and pollution of the ecosystem (Liu et al, 2015).…”

“…In terms of physical quality, material flow analysis determines the flow characteristics and the conversion efficiencies of urban power sources, materials, and energy in terms of conversion from raw materials to products and waste, usually in tons (Kennedy et al, 2015). However, due to differences in the physical properties of materials, the conversion process of different substances cannot be easily incorporated into the material flow analysis, which explains the lack of economic, social, and demographic factors in urban and ecological systems (Wang, Fang & Wang, 2015). In contrast, a method called emergy analysis, which was proposed by Odum in the 1980s (Odum, 1983; Odum, 1988), enables the analysis of energy flows, logistics, and other ecological flows of various ecosystems or eco-economic systems that are difficult to measure and uniformly convert into a unified unit, such as renewable resources, non-renewable resources, goods, services, and even information and education.…”

The Spatial-Temporal Characteristics and Dilemmas of Sustainable Urbanization in China: A New Perspective Based on the Concept of Five-in-One

“…The concept of coupling stems from the physics [74][75][76]. Coupling describes the phenomenon by which two or more systems influence each other through interactive mechanisms [77][78][79][80].…”

“…The coupling degree can only signify how strongly the five subsystems interact with each other without reflecting the level of coordination development [37], which makes it required to introduce the coupling coordination degree model as follows [74][75][76][77][78][79][80]:…”