China Core Cities & Metropolitan Area Development Index 2019 released

8. Ecological resources and environment

Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing are the top three in the ecological resources and environment category. The top 10 core cities also include Guangzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Xiamen, and Wuhan. Compared with 2018, among the 36 core cities, the rankings of Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Nanjing, Changsha, Guiyang, Kunming, Lhasa, and Xining have more or less increased.

Ecology and environment quality as well as resource efficiency become increasingly more important for urban development. This major item, ecological resources and environment, pays attention to environmental quality and resource efficiency, and also takes into account the evaluation of environmental efforts. It is particularly worth emphasizing that it also introduces the evaluation of CO2 emissions this year.

Thus, this major item includes three sub-items, resource and environment qualities, environmental efforts, and resource efficiency. They are gauged by 15 sets of index data, including comfortable degree of weather, air quality, water resources per 10,000 people, forest area, direct losses caused by natural disasters, direct losses caused by geological disasters, disaster warnings, area of green space in parks, environmental efforts, projects of designing, evaluating, and identifying environment-friendly buildings, national environmental protection city, population in densely inhabited districts, CO2 emissions per unit of GDP, per capita CO2emissions, and urban land output rate.

(1) Resource and environment qualities

Among the 36 core cities, only Haikou, Lhasa, and Kunming rank among the top 30 in the country in this sub-item, ranking 15th, 17th and 27th, respectively. Environment quality seems to be common shortcomings of core cities. Compared with 2018, among the 36 core cities, the rankings of Chongqing, Ningbo, Nanning, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Nanjing, Lanzhou, Xining, Hefei, Changsha, and Wuhan have risen significantly.

(2) Environmental efforts

Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are the top three in this sub-item. The top 10 core cities also include Chongqing, Guangzhou, Zhengzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, and Chengdu. Compared with 2018, among the 36 core cities, the rankings of Shenzhen, Zhengzhou, Nanjing, Chengdu, Xiamen, Jinan, Ningbo, Xi'an, Guiyang, Changchun, Yinchuan, Taiyuan, Urumqi, Hohhot, Haikou, and Xining have increased.

(3) Resource efficiency

Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing are the top three in this sub-item. The top 10 core cities also include Guangzhou, Wuhan, Chengdu, Changsha, and Nanjing. Compared with 2018, among the 36 core cities, the rankings of Changsha, Chongqing, Guiyang, and Lhasa have increased.