Assessing spatial and temporal variations in regional sustainability in mainland China from 2004 to 2014

Sustainable development in China is under increasing pressure from rapid population growth and economic activities in recent decades. Despite the growing awareness and invested efforts, there is a lack of understanding of the progress, trade-offs, and spatiotemporal variations of sustainability across China. This paper investigates the spatial and temporal variations of sustainability in Mainland China from 2004 to 2014. An evaluation framework involving 21 indicators, which are grouped under the three categories of economic, social, and environmental performance, is proposed for evaluating the Sustainability Index (SI) for 31 provincial-level divisions in China. Balancing the ‘triple bottom line’ performance to achieve sustainability is an ideal goal, which is analyzed for each geographical region in China. The ideas of the analytic hierarchy process have been used under four different scenarios to investigate trade-offs among the three performance areas and reveal the impacts of indicator weights on the assessment results. Results obtained show marginal improvement in sustainability across China when social and environmental factors are considered to be more important than economic ones, while a significant improvement is observed when economy is considered to be more important. The indicator weights have a clear impact on the assessment of SI, but the influence is reduced when the results for 2004 and 2014 are compared. This study provides an enhanced understanding of spatial and temporal variations in regional sustainability in China, providing more evidence for informed decisions on regional economic, social and environmental development.