Dynamic Analysis And Forecasting Of The Ecological Footprint Of Urban Residents’ Living Consumption In Shenyang

With the accelerated pace of construction of ecological city, sustainable urbandevelopment has attracted more and more attention. As one of the basic proposition of thetheory of sustainable urban development, the sustainability of urban residents’ livingconsumption is becoming the focus of current research. The common method of quantitativeanalysis and evaluation of sustainable consumption is ecological footprint analysis.Under the support by the policy of "revitalizing the northeast old industrial productionbase", the economy of Shenyang City developed by leaps and bounds, the people’s livingstandards increased day by day and the consumption structure has changed tremendously inrecent years. Under the new situation, people are still not unambiguous in understanding thesustainability of consumption and there seems to be lack of the targeted measures also.Therefore, in this study, based on the theory of sustainable development, we use ecologicalfootprint model to calculate the2000-2009ecological footprint per capita of urban residentsconsumption of Shenyang City, including the ecological footprint, ecological carryingcapacity and ecological deficit/surplus, the quantitative analysis of the development trendand composition structure of the ecological footprint per capita in urban residents’consumption, the assessment of the status of sustainable consumption, and the prediction ofecological footprint per capita of consumption of urban residents of the next decade by usingSPSS software. We achieved a general understanding of the future status of the next decade ofsustainable consumption of urban residents. Finally, we supposed several countermeasures onthe way to achieve sustainable consumption in Shenyang, in order to provide references forcity residents in the future to modify their consumption patterns and to achieve sustainableconsumption.The results show that the ecological footprint of urban residents’ consumption inShenyang City during2000-2009is overall upward trend from1.3826hm2per person to1.8729hm2per person, at an increase rate of36.46%. The growth of the fossil energy land isparticularly significant at a rate of354.82%. In the past decade, the ecological footprint ofShenyang City has been the category of ecological deficit, and the deficit trend is generallygrowing. The consumption of urban residents per capita will be sustained and rapidly growing,the unsustainable consumption situation will continue. In order to promote consumptiondevelopment to sustainable directions, citizens of Shenyang City can change unscientific consumer attitudes; put an end to food waste; reduce daily energy consumption; buyreasonable household goods; increase the support to public transport system; invest inscientific technology, improve land productivity and other measures to narrow ecologicaldeficit.