The Comprehensive Asseeement Of The Ecological Civilization Construction Level Of China’s Municipalities

The construction of ecological civilization is a long-term dynamic evolution process. It’s continuous, superposition and progressive. Indexes emphasize the correct direction of evolution. In the process of ecological civilization construction, indexes played a role of adjusting deviation, analyzing the patterns of evolution and understanding influence. This paper, for the first time, used integrated application of City Development Index (CDI) and Ecological Footprint (EF) to analyze the status of ecological civilization construction level during 1978-2012 of China’s municipalities. They are also used for the measurement of the transformation degrees of these municipalities’ development from resource-consumption mode to environment-friendly mode. The results demonstrated that CDI of each municipality increased continuously. The CDI value of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing were 86.25, 83.75,70.60,79.83 respectively in 2012. Each municipality reached almost the same level,80 in 2012. Overall, city economic and social development condition were both favorable. Although four municipalities’CDI value began in the different level, suffered the different growth rate, through more than 30 years’city construction, they reached almost the same destination. Compared with other cities’CDI all around the world, China’s municipalities were in the level of upper medium. Different from CDI, the change of EF value showed the characteristics of stage development. There are significant differences among municipalities. In addition to Shanghai, the EF value of the other three municipalities presented rising tendency. Since 2005, the EF value of Shanghai began to decline. Among other three municipalities, the EF value of Beijing grew slowest, whose growth rate was about 14%, while the EF value of Tianjin grew fastest, whose growth rate was about 47%. The EF value of Beijing was highest (2.60 hm2*cap-1), while Chongqing was lowest (1.79 hm2*cap-1). Chongqing was the only municipality whose value stayed below the national average. Comprehensive analysis of CDI and EF, to evaluate ecological civilization construction level of China’s municipalities, four municipalities can be divided into two groups. The first group was Shanghai and Chongqing, both of them were carried out for the consumption of EF effectively, in the meanwhile, the CDI remained a good momentum development. The second group was Beijing and Tianjin. Under the same share of city development, they consumed more environmental resources. Especially the development mode of Tianjin needed to revisit. The consumption of EF per CDI in Beijing was high, due to a large base and a large amount. But since 2000, it has been effectively controlled, and has been reduced in the last ten years. It indicated that Beijing realized the city was in the challenges of ecological civilization construction. So Beijing changed the mode of city construction from resource-consumption to environment -friendly. To sum up, Chongqing’s overall level of ecological civilization was highest, in addition, Chongqing has maintained a rapid growth rate. Tianjin has been in the development mode of resource-consumption, which needed to change its development mode as soon as possible. In the past decade, Shanghai and Beijing’s ecological civilization construction patterns appeared certain change, from the model of development at the expense of resource-consumption into environmental-friendly ecological civilization construction.