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Improving eco-efficiency can promote sustainable development. This study first evaluated the urban eco-efficiency of 84 cities in Western China from 2004 to 2017 by the undesirable-super-slack-based measure (US-SBM) and analysed their spatiotemporal characteristics, and then investigated its influencing factors using spatial econometric models. The results indicated that the urban eco-efficiency in Western China was at a relatively low level and showed a fluctuating upward trend with the highest average value of 0.65; however, capital cities of Western China have improved their eco-efficiency rapidly. Furthermore, there were obvious spatial spill-over impacts of the urban eco-efficiency in Western China. This paper also found that both the economic development level and urbanization level have “U” shaped impacts on Western China’s urban eco-efficiency, which decreases at first and then rises. Similarly, increasing the proportion of secondary industry promotes urban eco-efficiency, and FDI, trade activities, improved environmental regulations as well as technological innovation capabilities have a positive impact on urban eco-efficiency in Western China. This paper also put forward corresponding policy suggestions to promote Western China’s urban eco-efficiency. The present study may be helpful for policy-makers to balance economic development and environmental protection in Western China.

The Beijing(Jing)-Tianjin(Jin)-Hebei(Ji) (JJJ) urban agglomeration is one of the three major urban agglomeration in China, which plays an important strategic role in China’s regional development pattern. Based on the concern of inter-relationship within urban agglomeration, this paper creatively proposed a comprehensive gravity-Gram Schmidt Orthogonalization coupling model (CG-GSO) to quantitatively measure the urbanization development level at different regional scales. Compared with the information entropy method, the CG-GSO model was more reliable and fairer in evaluating the urbanization development of an urban agglomeration in the inter-annual dimension. We used the obstacle factor model to find out important ways to realize sustainable development at different regional scales. According to the trends from 2003 to 2017, the urbanization development levels were predicted by using the gray forecast model at different regional scales during 2018–2030. There was an upward trend in urbanization development at different regional scales. Compared with the internal single regions, a high starting and slow developing trend was in the urban agglomeration. In Beijing, the obstacle factors in urbanization development were in the demographic, social and eco-environmental subsystems. However, the obstacle factors were in the economic, eco-environmental and social subsystems in Tianjin, Hebei and JJJ urban agglomeration. The forecast results showed that urbanization development was going strong in internal regions from 2018 to 2030, while the overall urbanization development was slow in urban agglomeration. Urbanization development should focus on labor redistribution, weakening the boundary on social welfare, improving the efficiency of economic development and paying attention to protecting eco-environment for taking the sustainable development road in the JJJ urban agglomeration.

Sustainability is related to the coordination of a complex system that constitutes by society, economy, and environment. In particular, environmental factor is frequently considered irreplaceable among them. This paper proposed a framework for regional sustainability assessment by coupling environmental factor and an improved Human Development Index (HDI). The performance of the framework was then analyzed using the 66 counties in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) in China as a case study. On this basis, spatio-temporal assessment on the regional sustainability was assessed from the dimensions of society, economy, and environment. Results showed that the proposed framework could capture both socio-economic and environmental dimensions well to reflect the regional sustainability in the YRD. Specifically, it showed that sustainability was continuously improved in the YRD from 2000 to 2015. However, the sustainability revealed large differences among distinct dimensions. For instances, socio-economic sustainability was improved in 78.79% of the counties in the YRD from 2000 to 2015, but their environmental sustainability was declining in the same period. Spatially, the overall sustainability of the YRD showed autocorrelations and diverse aggregation characteristics among counties from 2000 to 2015. It is therefore essential to coordinate environment protection and economic development according to each city’s characteristic to realize sustainable development in future decades.

Whether the increasing regional eco-efficiency improves local residents’ health conditions has aroused great interest from scholars, practitioners or decision makers by implanting sustainable development strategy. And there lack direct quantitative evidence to testify the above influence is positive or negative, and computing its magnitude. Considering their uncertain, fuzzy and multi-factor complex relationship, the paper selected 5 indicators-Visits to hospitals, Outpatients with Emergency Treatment, Number of Inpatients, Number of Health Examinations, Patients Discharged-as proxy variables for residents’ health conditions and adopted regional eco-efficiency with other 6 control variables as explanatory variables, then built a Sensitivity Measurement Method with Support Vector Machines (SMM-SVM) to make analysis, finally applied Chinese province-level data from 2002 to 2016 to the proposed method. Empirical results shown that the changes at the national level and the provincial level were slightly different, which could be explained by control variables that characterize regional endowments: (1) From the national level, improving the eco-efficiency by 1% caused the decreasing of the number of Visits to Hospitals (0.041%), Outpatients with Emergency Treatment (0.029%), Outpatients with Emergency Treatment (0.307%) and a total 0.053%, equal to Patients Discharged (0.371%) minus Number of Inpatients (0.318%); (2) From the provincial level, 73.33%, 73.33%, 70.00% and 60.00%, 60.33% of 30 regions promoted the residents’ health condition by improving eco-efficiency, which was similar to the national level; (3) GDP per capita, Urbanization level, Population density, Medical personnel, Licensed (assistant) doctors, and Number of health care institutions were helpful to understand heterogeneity of degree of change. Provincial real situation and differences help to evaluate the effect of regional eco-efficiency on residents’ health conditions, and quantitatively guide the sustainable development and enhance public health.

With the rapid economic development and continuous growth of population in rapid urbanized area, the health status of urban ecosystem is undergoing profound changes, which will have a negative impact on the sustainable development. In order to systematically evaluate the health status of urban ecosystem in rapid urbanized area of central China, this paper puts forward a new assessment framework of structure-function-process-human health-development based on a deep understanding of the concept and general characteristics of urban ecosystem health, and establishes an expanded evaluation index system according to this evaluation framework. Then, on the basis of determining the index classification criteria in detail, the improved SI-MI model was used to evaluate the health status of urban ecosystem. As a case study, the framework and method were applied to the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze river, a region of the rapid urbanized in China. The results showed that, the health level of most cities in the study area has been improved from 2005 to 2015. From the perspective of spatial pattern, the health level of the study area shows obvious spatial heterogeneity, and provincial capital cities and some eco-cities have better health status. It is worth noting that the function and development layer are the key parts that restrict the overall health level of urban ecosystem in the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River. After classifying all cities, we found the factors influencing the health level of different types of cities, and proposed the management suggestions for different types of cities.

In the past decades, unprecedented dramatic economic development in the Chinese cities has also brought serious environmental problems. In line with this, the Chinese government has been investing great efforts and resources in addressing environmental problems. However, little previous studies have been conducted in examining whether this development is efficient from a win-win perspective balance between economic growth and environmental protection. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis on the environmental efficiency (EE) in the process of dramatic economic development in the Chinese cities. The Super-slack-based measure (Super-SBM) model is adopted to analyze the EE performance. Data used for analysis are collected from 283 sample cities in China. The research results indicate that the overall EE performance across the Chinese cities is relatively low, and the differences in EE performance among the 283 cities are significant. The top three EE performers are Shenzhen, Sanya and Erdos, and Baiyin, Xinzhou and Liupanshui are the bottom three performers. The results also suggest that the EE performance in the Eastern area, where most first-tier cities are located in, is significantly higher than that in the Central and Western areas (aggregated with fourth and fifth tier-cities). From the dynamic perspective, the results show that China has achieved significant improvement in environmental efficiency across the surveyed period of 2003–2016. The research findings provide valuable references not only for the Chinese policy-makers and practitioners to adopt measures for promoting a win-win balance between environmental protection and economic development in the Chinese context, but also for further studies on environmental efficiency in the international context.

While bringing socio-economic prosperity, rapid urbanization exerts severely impacts on the ecosystem service functions, resulting in unsustainable development. However, the loss of ecosystem services resulting from urbanization are seldom considered in regional sustainable development assessment. This paper aims to apply a super-efficiency slacks-based model (S-SBM) to evaluate the eco-efficiency by considering regional ecosystem service value (ESV). Moreover, an improved dynamic evaluation model, including the adjustment coefficients of natural geographical characteristic, socio-economic development level and resource scarcity, is developed to evaluate China’s provincial ESV in 2014. Based on the analysis of the evaluated dynamic ESV and eco-efficiency, our results show that (1) a total dynamic ESV of 88.60 trillion Yuan was provided in 2014, and the highest ESV provinces mainly distributed northwest and southeast coastal areas, while the lowest ESV provinces were mainly located in North China Plain and central areas; (2) the relationship between ESV and gross domestic product (GDP) was spatially negative, expect for some southeast coastal areas; (3) our evaluated results demonstrate that ESV is a necessary factor in eco-efficiency evaluation. After considering regional ESV, positive changes occurred in almost all northwestern provinces, while southeastern provinces declined; (4) at last, the optimization analysis emphasizes that ESV is an important factor for sustainable development. In sum, the results of this study remind policy makers that they should consider fully regional ecological conditions in the implementation of urban development policies, so as to realize sustainable development goals.

The Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) is the prior region for achieving China’s strategic development with both economic and ecological goals. Since YREB covers more than 500 million people within a large area, the unbalanced urban sustainable development cannot be neglected. Different from the previous studies, this paper adopts an index of urban state carrying capacity (USCC) to assess the sustainable development in YREB. USCC can reflect the positive effects clearly, and evaluate the carrying capacity without the distortion from the opposite side. The assessment method combines the framework of Indicator-Benchmark Comparison (IBC) and the method of Analytical hieratical process (AHP), and sets up the indicator system for USCC from four perspectives. Based on the panel data for the years 2006–2014 in three scale levels, the analyses of temporal and spatial differentiation are conducted to discuss the unbalanced development in YREB. The results present that the eastern sub-UAs have much higher USCC values than the western ones significantly. The provincial cities and municipalities with higher USCC have strong impacts on their neighborhood cities around them. Further policies are suggested to support for other unbalanced sustainable development urban agglomerations like YREB.

Eco-efficiency is of great significance in facilitating a region’s sustainable development. However, there are some inconsistencies among the concepts and also relationships of eco-efficiency and its relevant efficiencies in recent studies. This paper integrates eco-efficiency and three related-efficiencies (economic efficiency, energy efficiency, and environmental efficiencies) into a total-factor analysis framework, regarding them as composite eco-efficiency indicators. Employing a new data envelopment analysis approach, named Meta-US-SBM, which considers meta-frontier, undesirable outputs, super efficiency, and slacks simultaneously, the measure system of these four efficiencies is established. An empirical study is conducted using Chinese provincial data from 2001 to 2014. Results indicate that, overall, the regional economic efficiency is better than other related efficiency indicators. Furthermore, different provinces are adopting different development modes, as denoted by significant heterogeneity among eco-efficiency indicators.

Energy sustainability is one of the largest challenges for sustainable development. Energy sustainability in China varies by regions because of the differences in energy resources, technology and economic levels. Previous studies have assessed national energy sustainability, few to none have looked internally on a regional or provincial scale. This paper defined energy sustainability from the four dimensions of security, efficiency, cleanness and low carbon emissions, established an index system and evaluated the energy sustainability levels of 30 provinces in China by the Improved Entropy Weight-Cloud Model (IEW-CM). The results show that: (1) General energy sustainability in Chinese provinces is deficient, and energy cleanness and efficiency perform better than security and low carbon emissions. (2) Chinese energy sustainability has obvious spatial heterogeneity and within the same province, the level is unbalanced in four dimensions. The characteristics of energy sustainability exhibit significant differences in different regions. (3) Energy security and low carbon emissions play a crucial role in achieving energy sustainability. Natural gas deliverability, energy consumption elasticity coefficient, CO2 emission per unit of energy and share of fossil energy consumption are the primary factors affecting energy sustainability differences among provinces.

Decoupling economic growth (EG) from water consumption (WC) is crucial to regional sustainable development. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the spatial and temporal decoupling of WC and EG, and then to identify the feasible paths for achieving the desired level of decoupling. Firstly, this paper measures the WC of the provincial areas in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) from 2004 to 2017 by using the water footprint (WF) method; Secondly, the decoupling analysis of WF and EG is carried out based on the Tapio decoupling model, furthermore, the spatial autocorrelations of decoupling results are examined by the Moran’s I index with three different spatial weight matrices; Finally, the paths of achieving strong decoupling (SD) of WC and EG are explored by using the static fixed effect regression model. Three main conclusions can be drawn: (1) The WFs of most provincial areas in the YREB show an overall increasing trend and there are huge disparities among the provinces in terms of their WFs; (2) The WF and EG in the YREB are decoupled either strongly or weakly. More SD has been achieved since 2015 in general. No spatial autocorrelations are observed; (3) Reducing the WF as the economy grows is a necessary condition for achieving SD. Moreover, developing water-saving technologies is a key path of achieving SD since it has huge positive impact on WF reduction. In a nutshell, this study provides a novel framework and results that can be used as an evaluation index and policy insights for decoupling EG from WC.

The rapid advancement of urbanization and industrialization has led to the continuous strengthening of multi-functionality of land use. The overlapping, crowding, agglomeration and transformation of various land use functions suggested that there would be fierce competition and conflicts. Based on the widely recognized “ecological-production-living” perspective of sustainable development in the world, we constructed the spatial identification and intensity diagnosis model of potential land use function conflicts (LUFCs), and selected Nan’an City, a typical coastal city in southeast China, as an empirical analysis. On the level of theoretical building, the LUFCs were divided into eight types, the conflict intensity was divided into four stages, and a land use conflict risk index (LUCRI) was constructed to characterize the possibility of potential conflict, which was divided into four ranks. Empirical research showed that the spatial concentration characteristic of ecological function of land use in Nan’an City was not significant and was poor spatial connectivity, while the gradient and band feature of production function was significant and was good spatial connectivity, and living function have formed three core clusters. The controllable conflict zones gathered and formed cold spots in high altitude forest areas, as well as the out-of-control conflict zones gathering and forming hot spots in concentrated areas of social and economic activities. The area proportions of different conflict types respectively were 1.79%, 18.07%, 23.17%, 13.49%, 8.00%, 13.66%, 20.34% and 1.49%. The whole study area was basically at risk of potential conflicts, with the area proportions accounting for 55.28%, 30.19%, 12.30% and 2.23%. Different governance strategies should be adopted according to the spatial distribution, manifestation and conflict degree. The model and index constructed in this paper could accurately reflect the actual situation of land use in fast-growing areas, which would provide reference for land space planning and management.

With the aggravation of global climate change, the frequency of global natural disasters is increasing year by year. How to actively respond to natural disasters has become the key to ensure the sustainable development of the region. Since urbanization in developing countries is much lower than that in developed countries, most scholars in the past focused on the regional resilience of developed countries rather than developing countries. China is the largest developing country in the world, choosing China as the research area has practical guiding significance. To assess the current state of China's regional resilience capacity, this paper establishes an evaluation system of resilience capacity index of 28 indicators based on China's actual situation. The comprehensive emergy and factor analysis method are used to evaluate the resilience capacity index of 26 regions (provinces) in China from four aspects: ecology, economy, engineering, and society. The results show that economy and ecology are the critical factors affecting regional resilience capacity index. China's regional resilience index has apparent characteristics of agglomeration, distribution, and imbalance in space. China's coastal resilience index is generally higher than China's inland region, showing gradient differentiation in spatial change. These characteristics are influenced by China's policy, which is consistent with the expected early effect of China's reform and opening-up policy.

Rapid urbanization has brought about a series of resource and environmental problems in China, especially in the western areas with fragile ecological environment conditions and weak economic basis. Therefore, the sustainable development of the western regions is of great importance, and how to choose a more reasonable development path has become an urgent problem. From the theory of systems ecology, this study analyzed the metabolic structure, efficiency and evolution of development mode of a typical western city-Xining based on the ecological emergy analysis. In addition, the paper puts forward effective policy suggestions to promote sustainable development in accordance with local characteristics. The study found that the sustainability level of Xining had been declining during the study period overall from 330.85 to 15.46, but the its decline rate had been decreasing, and finally the sustainability level remained stable in the last several years. It is closely related to the ecological civilization construction and green development strategy adopted by Xining city. With the development of economy, the metabolic efficiency of Xining has been improved and the metabolic structure has gradually become more reasonable due to the decline in emergy use per GDP and escalation in emergy exchange rate. The development of Xining can provide a role model and reference for the western regions, and the study could provide scientific basis and theoretical guidance for the sustainable development of western cities.

The regional level has been recognized as a good scale for implementing actions towards sustainable development (SD). An important pathway to improve regional sustainability is to locally carry out long-term ecological planning. In order to reduce environmental impacts from fast economic growth, several eastern provinces of China began Ecological Province Construction (EPC) at the end of 1990s. This paper presented a case for analyzing the progress of EPC in China via both qualitative and quantitative methods. We studied Shandong Eco-province Construction (SEPC) and evaluated its outcomes with its pre-set indicators in 2003–2010. A further evaluation with eco-efficiency and de-linking indices was conducted. The results indicated the pre-set indicators could not effectively reflect of the ecological province construction. It was recommended to introduce an evaluated framework combined with eco-efficiency and de-linking indices to indicate ecological planning at the regional scale.