Hongyan Bian , Yaxue Zhao , Jie Gao , Shiya wen , Jiaxuan Sun
{"title":"Sustainability under policy transitions in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China: Historical and the shared socio-economic pathways","authors":"Hongyan Bian , Yaxue Zhao , Jie Gao , Shiya wen , Jiaxuan Sun","doi":"10.1016/j.habitatint.2024.103091","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>China has responded to the sustainability challenges via a range of policies with evolving objectives in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YEB) since the 1990s. However, the multi-scale analysis of YEB's comprehensive sustainability and the human-environment nexus amid policy impact remains unexplored. A comprehensive review and forecast of historical and future sustainability pathways under policy impacts are imperative. Here, we systematically examined sustainability under ten National Policies (NPs) and Regional Development Policies (RDPs), forecasting Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) in the 21st Century using the entropy weight method and machine learning models. We found that RDPs have contributed to 1.6 times increase in human development from 2000 to 2018 across dimensions of demography, economy, and society in YEB. However, it also revealed that the west-east disparity has widened from 0.14 to 0.19 during this period. Conservation efforts and national initiatives for ecological civilization have led to environmental improvement in the YEB, especially after the RDP3 in 2014, when the eastern provinces, like Shanghai, have already surpassed the peak inverted U-shape curve of the environmental-human nexus. Among the SSPs, SSP1 shows the most sustainable scenario with the lowest ecological footprint at 6.2 hm<sup>2</sup> per capita and the highest value of regional sustainability and environmental subsystem. To achieve SSP1, an iterative, inclusive, and context-specific Science-Policy-Practice dialogue is essential. This enables feedback loops and collaboration among policymakers, scientists, and practitioners to foster regional sustainability by studying the implications of historical and future pathways.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":48376,"journal":{"name":"Habitat International","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":6.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Habitat International","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197397524000912","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"DEVELOPMENT STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
China has responded to the sustainability challenges via a range of policies with evolving objectives in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YEB) since the 1990s. However, the multi-scale analysis of YEB's comprehensive sustainability and the human-environment nexus amid policy impact remains unexplored. A comprehensive review and forecast of historical and future sustainability pathways under policy impacts are imperative. Here, we systematically examined sustainability under ten National Policies (NPs) and Regional Development Policies (RDPs), forecasting Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) in the 21st Century using the entropy weight method and machine learning models. We found that RDPs have contributed to 1.6 times increase in human development from 2000 to 2018 across dimensions of demography, economy, and society in YEB. However, it also revealed that the west-east disparity has widened from 0.14 to 0.19 during this period. Conservation efforts and national initiatives for ecological civilization have led to environmental improvement in the YEB, especially after the RDP3 in 2014, when the eastern provinces, like Shanghai, have already surpassed the peak inverted U-shape curve of the environmental-human nexus. Among the SSPs, SSP1 shows the most sustainable scenario with the lowest ecological footprint at 6.2 hm2 per capita and the highest value of regional sustainability and environmental subsystem. To achieve SSP1, an iterative, inclusive, and context-specific Science-Policy-Practice dialogue is essential. This enables feedback loops and collaboration among policymakers, scientists, and practitioners to foster regional sustainability by studying the implications of historical and future pathways.
期刊介绍:
Habitat International is dedicated to the study of urban and rural human settlements: their planning, design, production and management. Its main focus is on urbanisation in its broadest sense in the developing world. However, increasingly the interrelationships and linkages between cities and towns in the developing and developed worlds are becoming apparent and solutions to the problems that result are urgently required. The economic, social, technological and political systems of the world are intertwined and changes in one region almost always affect other regions.