Abstract:

After 40 years of rapid development, China has produced incredible economic results at the heavy cost of resources and the environment. Although research on this has attracted increasing attention, no unified paradigm has been formed so far. Additionally, the mechanical exploration of the interaction among socioeconomic factors, resources, and the environment is still weak, and conclusions lack operability, which makes it difficult to provide effective decision-making support for industrial development. This study focuses on the relationship among industry, population, resources, and environmental factors in order to construct a comprehensive evaluation framework to be applied to Hainan province. The framework first evaluates the importance of industries and then analyzes the quantitative relationship among regional industries, population resource consumption, and the intensity of pollution emissions. Finally, it sets different adjustments to the industrial structure based on the industrial and population resource consumption and the intensity of pollution emissions to evaluate the resource and environmental carrying capacity of different industrial structures (that is, the upper limit of the scale of industry and population). The results show that the current economic scale of Hainan province is not overloaded, and there remains room for further industrial development. For example, land resources have become the primary limiting factor for the development of Hainan province, followed by the water environment. Most pillar and basic industries with higher economic benefits are highly water-consuming and polluting industries. There is an urgent need to reduce the use of water resources as well as the intensity of pollution emissions. To further enhance economic development, it is necessary to cultivate industries with low energy consumption and low emissions. The evaluation method of resource and environmental carrying capacity constructed in this study holds clearer policy significance and can provide decision-making references for optimizing industrial structure adjustments while controlling the scale of industry and population development. This study further connects the theoretical research and practical application of resource and environmental carrying capacity, improves the operability of the research results in terms of decision-making support, and provides methodological references for the evaluation of resource and environmental carrying capacity. Future research challenges were also discussed. With respect to the specific application of the model, it is more meaningful to focus on the relative value of the model evaluation results (that is, differences among development scenarios) instead of the absolute values of each scenario.

Key words: Resource and Environmental Carrying Capacity (RECC), sustainable development, industrial structure, resource consumption, pollutant emission, Hainan Province