Sustainability assessment with time-series scores: a case study of Chinese provinces |
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Authors: | Keishiro Hara Michinori Uwasu Helmut Yabar Haiyan Zhang |
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Institution: | (1) Research Institute for Sustainability Science, Osaka University, 2-1 Yamada-oka, Suita Osaka, 565-0871, Japan |
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Abstract: | Asian nations are currently facing a number of challenges, including environmental degradation and growing societal inequalities,
in the course of their rapid economic growth and industrialization. Under such conditions, it is of critical importance to
develop appropriate assessment tools with which to comprehensively measure the sustainability status of a region in order
to guide its transformation into a sustainable society. This paper proposes a method of sustainability assessment consisting
of the three components of environment, resource, and socio-economic with aggregated time-series scores. This method can demonstrate
the relative sustainability scores of targeted regions for different time periods, thereby, enabling the comparison of relative
sustainability status for different regions over these periods. We carried out a case study of Chinese provinces for the years
2000 and 2005 using the proposed method and confirmed its applicability as the indicative type of sustainability assessment
at the regional level, while actually investigating the sustainability status and its chronological changes. The results indicated
that aggregate sustainability index scores improved between 2000 and 2005 in most provinces, mainly due to significant improvement
in the scores for the socio-economic component, whereas the scores for the environment component deteriorated in some provinces
over the study period. Our method proves to be effective in analyzing the relative sustainability status among targeted regions
for different time periods in the form of aggregate scores, paving the way for practical applications, such as policy analysis,
in the pursuit of a sustainable society. |
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Keywords: | Sustainability assessment Indicators Integrated scores Capitals Kuznets curve China |
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