Author(s)

JUNXUE ZHANG, CHANGHAI PENG

Abstract

As one of the most famous ancient capitals in China, Yangzhou city has more than two thousand years of history and holds a vital position in southern China. With the rapid development of the economy, the ecological environment has also deteriorated, so the ecological assessment of Yangzhou city becomes more and more important. As a typical ecological assessment method, emergy theory has lots of advantages, because it is a quantitative assessment method. The research scope of this paper involves renewable resources and a nonrenewable exchange in Yangzhou city. In this paper, some parameters of Yangzhou city are discussed to evaluate ecology through emergy indexes. Simultaneously, by analyzing the changes of GDP from 2012 to 2016, the economic development and ecological changes of Yangzhou City are compared and evaluated. The results of emergy analysis show that renewable resources almost have no change from 2012 to 2016 and non-renewable resources have rapid growth. With the development of Yangzhou city, Environmental loading ratio (ELR) increases quickly from 2012 to 2016. The urban ecological sustainability has no improvement. In addition to emergy analysis, the GDP analysis results demonstrate that Yangzhou’s GDP and per capita GDP grows rapidly from 2012 to 2016. However, there is no satisfied effect for the structural adjustment that the government has executed. Although the product of secondary industry has decreased, the scale of the tertiary industry has not enhanced. In conclusion, the development in recent years has not achieved sustainable ecological development in Yangzhou city.

Keywords

urban ecology, emergy methodology, quantitative assessment, ecological indexes, Yangzhou city, structural adjustment