PROGRESS IN GEOGRAPHY ›› 2017, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (3): 266-276.doi: 10.18306/dlkxjz.2017.03.001

• Special Issue: Resource and Environmental Carrying Capacity • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Basic points and progress in technical methods of early-warning of the national resource and environmental carrying capacity (V 2016)

Jie FAN1,2,3(), Kan ZHOU1,2, Yafei WANG1,2   

  1. 1. Key Laboratory of Regional Sustainable Development Modeling, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
    2. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
    3. College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
  • Received:2017-01-01 Online:2017-03-20 Published:2017-03-20
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China, No.41630644;Science and Technology Service Network Initiative of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, No.KFJ-STS-ZDTP-021

Abstract:

This article discusses the design basis of the early-warning system of resource and environmental carrying capacity, explains the basic concepts of resource and environmental carrying capacity and its evaluation and early-warning mechanism, and builds the theoretical model and develops key technical points of the early-warning of the national resource and environmental carrying capacity evaluation (2016 version), including technical process, evaluation system, integration methods, and classification approaches, which can provide an important technical reference for carrying out the early-warning of national resource and environmental carrying capacity overloading. This research shows that "the limits to growth" is the theoretical basis of the early-warning of resource and environmental carrying capacity. Based on the county-level administrative regions, this work carries out evaluation of terrestrial and marine resource and environmental carrying capacity respectively, both include basic and specific evaluations. The basic evaluation adopts unified basic indicators to conduct an overall regional evaluation; and the specific evaluation is conducted for different major functional zones, including optimized development zones, priority development zones, and restricted development zones, with corresponding characteristic indicators. Then the worst performing one of all indicators is used to classify the evaluated units, which separates the evaluated regions into resource and environmental overloading, critical overloading, and non-overloading areas. Combining with the evaluation results of resource and environmental consumption, five early-warning levels—red (extremely serious warning), orange (serious warning), yellow (medium-level warning), blue (slight warning), and green (no warning) are divided based on the classification results. Finally, the three carrying capacity types and five early-warning levels of resource and environmental are verified through the terrestrial-marine coordinated test.

Key words: resource and environmental carrying capacity, early-warning, technical process, evaluation system, major function oriented zone