Quantitative Evaluation On The Regional Carrying Capacity Of The Economic Zone In East China

The economic zone in East China is the key area for China’s economic development, comprehensively evaluating and predicting whose carrying capacity will be of great significance for Chinese social, political and economic sustainable development.In this dissertation, a regional carrying capacity quantitative assessment system, with the coastal 9 provinces and 3 cities Liaoning, Hebei, Beijing, Tianjin, Shandong, Jiangsu, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan as the research objects, was set up. The data needed were extracted from vectorgraphs of rivers and communication lines, from raster maps of land types, precipitation and wind speed, and from remote sensing interpretation (in early 21 century and 2005-2007) results of desertification and wetlands. And, the economic and social data from 1998 to 2007 were collected from statistical yearbooks and organized. They formed the evaluation indicators for the quantitative assessment system, on the basis of which a complete spatial database was established.The approach of principal component analysis was adopted to analyze the regional assimilation capacity and relative carrying status, the ecological footprint method was utilized to calculate the support capacity and the renewable resources carrying capacity, then the synthetic carrying capacity was compared with the carrying quantity to judge the absolute regional carrying status. A Neural Networks based Cellular Automata model was employed to spatiotemporally simulate and predict the carrying status of economic zone in East China from 2008 to 2020.The absolute carrying capacity results show that the regions with GOOD carrying status were located in Zhangjiakou, Chengde, Chaoyang, Fuxin, Tieling, Nanping and a few areas of Guangxi, and the regions including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangzhou have been basicly in a POOR carrying status. It is easy to identify that since 2003 the areas with POOR carrying status have been spreading to Dalian, Qingdao, Shenyang, Weihai, Wuxi, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Zhoushan, Xiamen and so on. The regions with less area of POOR carrying status are Guangxi, Hainan, Hebei and Fujian, Shanghai has the biggest area of POOR carrying status, then Beijing and Tianjin, while in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Guangdong, Liaoning and Shandong the area spreading speed with POOR carrying status is relatively lower.The spatial prediction results for the regional carrying status indicate that overall carrying situation of the zone is deteriorating: the area with POOR carrying status has been increasing since 2007 with the feature of large cities at the expanding centers. Generally the condition is more serious in coastal areas.According to the quantitative analysis and prediction, corresponding policy recommendations were put forward in the hope of serving as reference for making regional continuable development and city group layout plan, and basis for resources & environment protection.