Spatial distribution of the environmental resource consumption in the Heihe River Basin of Northwestern China

Sustainable development needs to consider the inequality between economic development and resource consumption and keep it within a rational range. Therefore, quantitatively measuring this inequality is an important and hot issue. Using the ecological footprint as the index of environmental resource consumption, the spatial inequality of this parameter and the reasons for the inequality were analyzed using the Gini coefficient and the Theil index in the Heihe River Basin of northwestern China. The spatial inequality of resource consumption was clearly high. Decomposing the Theil index into urban and rural areas showed that spatial inequality was mainly derived from the inter-regional inequality between urban and rural areas (this accounted for 63.89% of the total inequality). When the Theil index was decomposed into different sections along the Heihe River Basin (e.g., the upper, middle, and lower reaches), the spatial inequality was mainly derived from the internal inequality within the middle reach (this accounted for 80.95%). Finally, the regression analysis of the Gini coefficients of the ecological footprint, resident income and population revealed that the ecological footprint inequality increased with rising income and population inequality, although the latter had a lower effect than the former.