Comprehensive evaluation of different scale cities\' sustainable development for economy, society, and ecological infrastructure in China

Abstract Cities are hybrid socioeconomic-natural ecosystems that represent humanity's densest concentrations of people and their activities. Changes in land use have led to the dramatic reduction of urban wetlands and green space which serve as ecological infrastructure in urban areas, bringing further environmental deterioration. Sustainable development is thus necessary to allow urbanization to continue. Urban sustainable development can be monitored using an indicator system that accounts for both socioeconomic development and the construction of ecological infrastructure. We designed a 22-indicator system capable of meeting this need, and applied it to data from 2000 to 2010 for 277 Chinese cities, including megalopolises, large cities, and small or medium-sized cities. Using the Full Permutation Polygon Synthetic Indicator method, results from 2000 to 2010 showed that indicator values for socioeconomic development, ecological infrastructure construction, and comprehensive sustainability improved at all three city scales. Moreover, the sustainable development level increased with increasing city scale, accompanied by decreasing values of energy consumption per unit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during ten years, and decreasing potential to improve comprehensive capacity for sustainable development in the future. We also found that the investment in ecological infrastructure construction accounted for only 1.67% of GDP through 2010, and its growth did not effectively control pollutant emissions in China. Additional efforts should be made to achieve greater sustainable environmental management. Overall, Chinese cities still have a long way to go to achieve comprehensive sustainable development; thus it is necessary to implement planning and measures to guide future urbanization and ecological infrastructure construction in China.