A Review on the research and practice of city sustainable development indicators and indices

5th International Conferences on Geological,Geographical, Aerospaces and Earth Sciences 2017

Xiang, Ning^1,2

China National Institute of Standardization, No.4 Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing

100191, China^1

Key Laboratory for Solid Waste Management and Environment Safety, Tsinghua University, Zhongguancun Street, Haidian District, Beijing

100084, China^2

关键词: Academic research;    Assessment process;    City sustainable development;    Economic activities;    Environmental carrying capacities;    Indicator system;    Indicators and indices;    Strong sustainability;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/88/1/012024/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/88/1/012024

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

City sustainable development indicators and indices have become a hot issue in academic research and practical application, alongside the high-speed worldwide urbanization and driven by the actual managing demand. This article is aimed at a clear understanding of the progress in relevant research and practice. This is done by collecting common indicators and indices for city sustainable development and making comparison of the assessment process and contents, so as to find out main obstacles for the development of this research field and explore the direction for efforts to be made next step. The article divides these indicators and indices into two categories: indicators serving as single index which can provide an explicit description on the relationship between economic activities and environmental carrying capacity, but have a narrow scope of assessment and use complicated methods to collect and calculate data; indices based on indicator systems which can represent multiple processes, could reflect the view of strong sustainability and are easy to use, but can hardly depict the responding relationship between social, environmental and economic changes for city sustainable development or assure the scientific rigor of weight setting. Practices on indicators and indices for city sustainable development was summarized, and its problems were reviewed with China being representative of transitioning countries. According to the review, great progress has been achieved in the research and practice of indicators and indices for city sustainable development, but consistency of theories, rationality of indicators and scientific rigor of methodology are to be improved significantly.