A spatial comparative analysis of environmental impacts in Chinese urban metabolic processes

Presented in this paper is an overview of environmental impacts in 31 typical Chinese cities in view of spatial variations based on emergy analysis. Moreover, the economic and ecological loss varies significantly across cities both in total sum due to diversities of geographic features, economic development levels and local energy use availability. A relative ranking of ESI variance ratio from the worst to best off showed the distribution of China's urban ecosystem metabolic levels. The results offer not only a classification of urban emissions’ impacts during the investigation period, but also the spatial hierarchy which may explain the spatial pattern of the landscape. This paper provides a reference towards how the urban environmental impacts drive economic policy and sustainability.