Assessment of sustainable development system in Suihua City, China

Sustainable development is a complex and systemic issue. It is essential to study it by the component analysis method from the view of system science. The urban developmental sustainability is one of focuses that people has paid more attention to, however, little common understanding how to measure and evaluate the sustainability has been gotten. In this paper, a framework is designed to evaluate the developmental sustainability of Suihua City, Heilongjiang Province in China from the aspects of economy, society, population, resources and environment. We adopt the Principal Components Analysis (PCA) to decrease dimensions and simplify the original indexes into 12 indexes. Also, the hierarchy and comprehensive multiple-criterion evaluative methods are employed to assess the sustainable development system in Suihua City. Then, the weights of indexes are attained by Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. Furthermore, urban comprehensive development level, developmental sustainability, coordinate degree are calculated and analyzed. By analyzing, we know the fluctuation of development level of subsystem, especially resources and environment subsystem, is acute. The comprehensive development level of sustainable development system in Suihua has been on the rise since 1999. That results from the effect of traditional economic development mode with high energy-consumed being decreased in the city after 1999. At the same time, it is obvious that there was an instability of development level in Suihua City during 1990–2002, with a turn in 1998, and the development could be sustainable, the status trend was more harmonious in 1999–2002.