Performance evaluation of ecological transformation of mineral resource-based cities: From the perspective of stage division

Ecological transformation is important for the sustainable development of China's Mineral Resource-based Cities (MRCs). The ecological transformation performance evaluation will help improve the accuracy and pertinence of transformation policy formulation. Based on the innovative division of ecological transformation stages of MRCs (transformation restoration, transformation adjustment, and transformation innovation periods), this empirical study takes 109 MRCs in China as the object and 2013-2019 as the time window and constructs the corresponding evaluation index system of China's MRC ecological transformation and the evaluation model of Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis methods (ESDA) based on the Rough Set-Entropy Weight method. First, our results show that the ecological transformation performance of China's MRCs was poor. By 2019, 98% of the cities were in the adjustment stage. The transformation performance of cities with different resource types differed; from high to low, they were oil cities, ferrous metal cities, coal cities, and non-ferrous metal cities. Second, in terms of time, from 2013 to 2019, China's MRC ecological transformation performance showed a trend of first rising and then slightly fluctuating (from 0.3339 to 0.4158), of which the largest and smallest increases were the oil city (0.09) and black metal city (0.0803), respectively; Third, in terms of space, the ecological transformation of MRC in China had obvious spatial heterogeneity, spatial autocorrelation, and aggregation effect. On this basis, relevant policies such as dynamic monitoring, identification of transformation stage and regional cooperation are put forward. This study effectively expands the research on the ecological transformation of China's MRC and provided evidence for the precise formulation of relevant policies. It also provides a new perspective for the ecological transformation research of MRCs in other developing countries.