Evaluation of Urban Ecological Well-Being Performance — A Case Study of 30 Provincial Capital Cities in China

With the process of large-scale urbanization and dramatic economic development, the deterioration of urban ecological environmental problems pollution and excessive consumption of resources in the Chinese cities have become one of the severe challenges in recent years. Under the condition of limited resources and environment protection, natural capital has become absolutely scarce. It is important to improve the level of human well-being within the ecological limit to achieve sustainable urbanization. Ecological Well-being performance (EWP) reflects the relative trends of well-being level and the consumption of ecological resources. This paper measures the ecological well-being performance of the Chinese provincial capital cities. By adopting the input-output perspective，an index system is established for urban ecological well-being performance evaluation. The Super-slack-based measure (Super-SBM) model with both desirable and undesirable outputs is adopted to analyze the ecological well-being performance of 30 provincial capital cities in 2016. The results show as follows: 1) 30 major cities are at overall low level of EWP in 2016. 2) The top three ecological well-being performance performers are Haikou, Beijing and Guangzhou, and the bottom three performers are Urumqi, Lanzhou and Xining. 3) Spatially, the east of China ranks first, and the central and the western China are in the second and the third place respectively. Finally, the results from this study provide valuable references to policy-makers and practitioners for designing and adopting effective measures to promote the sustainable development in the Chinese cities