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Monday, March 21, 2011

Emergy synthesis for the urban ecosystem health of four municipalities in China

by G. Y. Liu, Z. F. Yang and B. Chen

The objective of this study is to measure and evaluate the healthy levels of urban ecosystems, employing an indices framework and a novel emergy-based index. Characteristics and comparative implications of the temporal variation of the urban ecosystem healthy levels are also outlined. Considering four factors including vigor (V), organizational structure (O), resilience (R) and function maintenance (F), emergy-based urban ecosystem health index(EUEHI) is established and employed to measure and evaluate the relative healthy levels among various ecosystems of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing as the typical Chinese cities. It is found that the integrated index of urban ecosystem health of these four cities followed as the sequence: Chongqing>>Beijing> Shanghai>Tianjin. In addition, linking up with the single-factor analysis, it shows that the key factors of urban ecosystem health are the promotion of urban metabolism function for an increased vigor, the protection of natural ecosystem for organizational structure, the decrease of socioeconomic development pressure for a maintaining resilience, and the derive of benefits for a continual function maintenance.


Shanghai, China, photo by Bert van Dijk

more posts about urban planning in Shanghai:

Urban Development To Combat Climate Change: Dongtan Eco-city and Risk Management Strategies

Analyzing the Variation of Building Density Using High Spatial Resolution Satellite Images: the Example of Shanghai City

A GIS-based gradient analysis of urban landscape pattern of Shanghai metropolitan area, China

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