The Regional Resource Supply and Environmental Capacity Analysis Based on the Ecological Footprint--a Case Study in Shijiazhuang of Hebei Province

Based on the theory of ecological footprint this paper analyzed the ecological economic system in Shijiazhuang city in the view of demands of economic system to natural resource and supply of ecosystem for natural resources. Quantitative analysis of the ecosystem of Shijiazhuang city was attempted to estimate the status of sustainable development and give some insight into protection of the ecological environment of it and its province, Hebei province.


Introduction
The term ecological footprint was first proposed by Rees and later refined by Wackernagel, a Canadian economist (1996) to describe quantitatively the use of natural resources by humans and their supply via nature to indicate regional sustainable development ability.Ecological footprint analysis compares human demand on nature with the biosphere's ability to regenerate resources and provide services.It does this by assessing the biologically productive land and marine area required to produce the resources a population consumes and absorb the corresponding waste, using prevailing technology.Footprint values at the end of a survey are categorized for biomass (food, fiber), build-up lands, water and energy and as well as the total footprint number of Earths needed to sustain the world's population at that level of consumption.This resource accounting is similar to life cycle analysis wherein the consumption of cropland, forestry, build-up land, water area, pastureland and ocean are converted into a normalized measure of land area called 'global hectares' (gha).Per capita ecological footprint (EF) is a means of comparing consumption and lifestyles, and checking this against nature's ability to provide for this consumption.The tool can inform policy by examining to what extent a nation uses more (or less) than is available within its territory, or to what extent the nation's lifestyle would be replicable worldwide.The higher the footprint is the more human demand.
Due to no conspicuous distinguish between "ecological capacity" and "environmental capacity " by our government and researchers all over the world, in view of the particularity and availability of the land resource, the ecological capacity in the present paper is environmental capacity.

Background introduction
Located in the vicinity of the North China Plain, Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province, neighbors Beijing and Tianjin in the north, Henshui city in the east, and lies against the continuous Taihang Mountain in the west and Xingtai city in the south.Covering an area of 15.8 thousand square kilometers (6100.4square miles), it has 6 districts, 12 counties, 5 county-level cities and 1 national-level new and high-tech development zone under its prefecture.Shijiazhuang has a population of 9.395 million, 2.313 million of whom live in the urban area.Sitting in the central south of vast North China Plain, Shijiazhuang City is located at the longitude of 113°31′~115°29′, and the latitude of 37°26′~38°46′.Shijiazhuang City enjoys convenient transportation conditions, called as "a gate from south to north and the throat from Hebei to Shanxi" and "One of the cardinal foundation of pharmacy industry".Enveloped in the temperature continental monsoon climate, it's clearly distinguished between seasons with yearly average temperature of 13.3 centigrade, the coldest month of the year (January) at-2.9 centigrade, compared with the warmest (July) at 26.5 centigrade.The average precipitation is 534.6mm,sunshine hours more than 2513.9hours.The city gross product increased from 78.1 billion yuan in 1997 to 178.6 billion yuan in 2005, and thus the city is during a mew period to adjust economic structure at present.

Analysis of resource supply and environmental capacity in 2005
3.1 Analysis of resource consumption 3.1.1Biomass consumption Biomass resource is categorized for farm, animals, water and forestry products, and each category has its small sort.Calculation of biomass productive area was adopted the average yield from the data of World and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of United Nations in 2003, which facilitate to the comparison with countries and regions.Biomass consumption of Shijiazhuang city in 2005 was converted into ecological arable land area which this consumption demands, and the data in detail was list in Table 1.

Energy consumption and built-up land
Energy balance accounts dealt with several kinds of energy as follows: raw coal, coke, gasoline, diesel and power according to the energy consumption data of Shijiazhuang city.Fuel consumption was converted into fossil energy yield land area, based on the the criterion of average calorific value per fossil energy yield land area in the world, and heat resulted from local energy consumption was converted into fossil land area.According to the land area derived from Shijiazhuang land census data in 2005, built-up land data and its area converted by power consumption was processed with results listed in Table 2 in detail.

Trade adjustment of Ecological footprint calculation
Calculation of ecological footprint indices demands for net consumption, and thus trade adjustment should be taken into account in the expenditure of biomass and energy, namely calculating the ecological footprint of biomass consumption, energy consumption, net expenditure of the population in regions.Due to no access to detail external trade information from regions, trade adjustment of import and export was not considered in the present paper.

Per capita ecological footprint demand
The results of ecological footprint of Shijiazhuang city in 2005 were list in Table 3.

Environmental capacity calculation
Equivalence factors were selected from the reports of ecological footprint all over the world.When yield land area of Shijiazhuang city was converted into comparable biology yield land area, equivalence factors of arable land, grassland, forestry land, water area and built-up land were limited by data.Then we multiplied the corresponding equivalence factor by present physical spatial areas-arable land, grassland, forestry land, water area and built-up land.'Yield factor' selected in the paper was once used to calculate Chinese ecological footprint by Wackernagel (1996) and the average yield factor applied was 1.66, 0.19, 0.91, 1 and 1.66 respectively.At the same time, based on the proposal by World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), 12% of the biologically productive land area should be taken away from ecological footprint to protect biodiversity (Wackernagel, 2000, PP. 21-42, Lenzen, 2001, PP. 229-255, Xu, 2007, PP. 56-57).Available environmental capacity of Shijiazhuang city was listed in Talbe 4.

Analysis of resource carrying capacity and environmental capacity
Consequence of ecological footprint was composed of its demand and available ecological yield land area, namely environmental capacity.

Conclusions and proposals
According to the analysis above, per capita ecological footprint demand, environmental capacity and ecological deficit of Shijiazhuang city in 2005 were 2.7159 hm 2 , 0.3899 hm 2 and 2.326 hm 2 , respectively.Those numbers were far higher than ecological deficit in China.(According to "Report on sustainable development of domestic land resource in China ( 2004) " compiled by Land Resource Information Centre in China, per capita ecological footprint increased during the period of 1978~2003, and amounted to 0.890 hm 2 in 2003).The ecological deficit indicated that Shijiazhuang city was in a situation of unsustainable development.
According to per capita ecological footprint demand structure, there was conspicuous discrepancy between the structures of productive land supply and social economy development demand in ecological economy system of Shijiazhuang city, which was mainly ascribed to no preservation of CO 2 absorption land and failure service for fossil fuel demand.Per capita ecological footprint of built-up land was 0.0022 hm 2 , while that of ecological supply was 0.0899 hm 2 which was 0.0877 hm 2 higher than demand with surplus supply.Meanwhile, there was great discrepancy between the demand and supply of arable land and forestry land.Demand of arable and forestry land was 0.8061 hm 2 and 0.5761 hm 2 while supply was 0.2947 hm 2 and 0.0583 hm 2 , respectively.Per capita supply of built-up land exceeded ecological demand.Moreover, according to planning revision of land utilization, more and more cropland was occupied, especially for arable land.Demand of grassland and water area was 1.0008 hm 2 and 0.0217 hm 2 while supply was 0 hm 2 and 0.0002 hm 2 , respectively.This acute discrepancy was attributed to the calculation and analysis based on the conversion of average level of the world, however, it was not necessarily the case in fact.Local stockbreeding industries rely on not only the natural grassland, but mainly feedstuff which resulted from development of feedstuff through internal structure adjustment of agriculture and establishing of professional livestock farm.Annual pork products from farmers rank the top in the region, not totally provided by grassland.Based on less invalidity of the serious imbalance of local demand and supply proportion, aquatic product doesn't rely on large amount of water area but intensive artificial propagation, and thus improving the resource utilization could solve the supply deficiency problem of water area.
According to the supply structure of the resource carrying area, per capita footprint of arable land was attained to 0.2947 hm 2 accounting for 5.58%.In addition, in order to protecting biodiversity 12% of the biologically productive land area was not retained.Taken together, natural ecological system degraded, configuration of land utilization was unreasonable and configuration of ecological spatial category for local population consumption was somehow single in Shijiazhuang city.
Without reducing the standard of living, the ecological deficit mainly ascribed to excess utilization of natural resource could be ameliorated by the following measures: 1) Alter consumption manners of produce and life, establish resource-economizing consumption system of social production.
2) Based on the development of science and technology, adopt new technology and improve per capita yield of natural resource.
3) Utilize the present resource efficiently.4) Import inadequate resource from other regions to balance ecological footprint.

Table 1 .
Biomass accounts of Shijiazhuang city

Table 3 .
Per capita ecological footprint of Shijiazhuang city

Table 5 .
Ecological footprint and environmental capacity of Shijiazhuang city