COS 131-1
The Shanghai-Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration (SHYRDUA) Data Center – A useful tool for the long-term sustainability research on local and regional scales
The urban agglomeration has been considered as the major embodiment of China’s rapid and massive urbanization. However, a series of ecological and environmental problems rise with the urbanization process both on local and regional scales. Sustainable development has long been recognized as the solution to these problems, and research on urban and regional sustainability burgeons. In order to support research work on sustainability, a huge amount of social, economic, environmental and ecological data are required, especially on model-building of decision making systems. In such a case, a long-term and comprehensive data center will be a useful tool for data integration, management and sharing. The Shanghai-centered Yangtze River Delta covers an area of 210,000 square kilometers, which composes 1.1% of the total area in China. Nonetheless, the local population is 97.23 million, which is 7.3% of the total population, and the local GDP reaches 4.32 billion Chinese Yuan, up to 17.5% of the total GDP. The SHYRDUA is one of the six biggest urban agglomerations all over the world, and to understand how it can achieve sustainable development is an urgent need. The SHYRDUA Data Center (SDC) has been established to fulfill the data requirements. Our presentation aims to introduce the SDC and demonstrate an SDC-based application on the study of the urbanization of SHYRDUA and its environmental impact.
Results/Conclusions
Regarding the urbanization of SHYRDUA, the result shows that the urban population increases by 76.57 million in the past 50 years, and the urbanization level increases to 64.68% in 2011 from 25.16% in 1960. The urbanization of SHYRDUA is slower than the world’s average growth from 1960 to 2005, but it has been growing faster since 2005. The overall urbanization can be categorized into three distinctive stages, i.e. the declining stage from 1960 to 1977, the stable stage from 1978 to 1988, and the acceleration stage from 1989 to 2011. The policy factor plays a key role in determining the urbanization dynamics, such as the “Cultural Revolution” from 1966 to 1976, and the “Reform and Open” launched in 1978. In addition, the environmental quality of SHYRDUA was assessed. Based on the assessment for 2005, the Zhejiang province of SHYRDUA obtains the highest score, and the Shanghai has the lowest one. In order to investigate the impact of the urbanization on the environmental quality, the assessment for 2010 is in progress.