Spatial-temporal evaluation of marine ecological civilization of Zhejiang Province, China

Abstract Eco-Civilization Construction has gone through 8 years since it has been included in the “five-in-one” overall layout in the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. As an important part of Eco-Civilization Construction, Marine Eco-Civilization Construction (MECC) has also made great achievement in China. This paper was the first attempt to evaluate the performance of Marine Eco-Civilization Construction at county scale. Selecting 20 specific indicators from six subsystems, including resource, ecology, culture, governance, economy and society, we developed an evaluation system for MECC. With the combination of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the entropy method, we measured the MECC performance of all 32 coastal counties in Zhejiang Province from 2010 to 2016 and calculated the coordination degree among six subsystems. Temporally, the performance level of coastal districts and counties in Zhejiang was increased steadily, and spatially, the coordination degree however was relatively low in some counties indicating the spatial discordance. Our study could provide important insights for further promoting MECC in China at local scale as well as for other coastal regions’ sustainability.