Coupling and coordination of socioeconomic and ecological environment in Wenchuan earthquake disaster areas: Case study of severely affected counties in southwestern China

The Chinese government established a counterpart support mechanism and ecological civilization construction to promote socioeconomic development and ecological protection after the Wenchuan earthquake. However, the contradiction between the ecological environment and socioeconomic is still has not changed fundamentally. How to coordinate the relationship between the socioeconomic and ecological environment in the disaster area has become a key issue to the sustainable development after the Wenchuan earthquake. The purpose of this paper is to research the coupling and coordination relationship between socioeconomic and ecological environment to provide reference for Wenchuan earthquake disaster area to achieve regional sustainable development goals (SDGs) and high-quality development. Based on this, the dynamic deviation maximization (DM) method and coupling coordination model (CCD) were used to calculate the indicator weight and the overall coordination relationship between socioeconomic (SE) and ecological environment (EE) in Wenchuan earthquake disaster area by using the data from 2005 to 2018. The results showed that the CCD of the Wenchuan earthquake disaster area has increased from 2005 to 2018. From the spatial characteristics, the comprehensive evaluation score of CCD decreased from northeast to southwest in the disaster area, and there is still a significant spatial difference in the disaster area. Besides, the interesting finding is that post-disaster reconstruction and recovery capacity are closely related to location factors, population factors and altitude factors. On this basis, the causes of regional differences are analyzed, and some corresponding concrete suggestions are proposed, involving strengthen the policies to prevent labor loss, expand the characteristic industries of each country according to local conditions, and increase investment in technological innovation.