How to Evaluate Provincial Ecological Civilization Construction? The Case of Jiangsu Province, China

Ecological civilization is a transcendence of industrial civilization. The improvement of China’s ecological civilization system can not only provide developing countries with an empirical reference for ecological civilization construction, but also make a huge contribution to the progress of global ecological civilization. This paper focuses on improving the provincial ecological civilization evaluation system. First, the Provincial Ecological Civilization Construction Evaluation Index System is established according to the Green Development Index System issued by the Chinese government in 2016, and then the applicability of the Spatio-Temporal Factor Analysis (STFA) is verified as the evaluation method of the provincial ecological civilization construction level. Further, taking Jiangsu Province, China as an example, this paper evaluates the level of ecological civilization construction in each city of Jiangsu Province, and analyzes the main factors affecting ecological civilization based on the evaluation results. Finally, according to the relationship between the ecological civilization construction and economic quality of each city, the four-quadrant method is applied to divide Jiangsu Province into four types of regions to help each city position itself in ecological civilization construction. This paper mainly draws the following conclusions: (1) Due to its simple operation and accurate evaluation results, STFA is applicable in evaluating the provincial ecological civilization construction level. (2) Taking Jiangsu Province as an example, it is found that the level of ecological civilization construction in the southwestern region is higher than that of the northeast coastal region in Jiangsu. Three inequality indices are applied to measure the regional inequality of ecological civilization construction among 13 cities, which is relatively high in recent years. (3) By analyzing the results of STFA, it is found that economic quality and natural protection are not only the main factors affecting the ecological civilization construction in Jiangsu province, but also the main reasons for the regional heterogeneity of provincial ecological civilization. (4) For the four types of regions, suggestions are proposed according to the characteristics of each region to help improve the provincial ecological civilization construction level. This paper not only improves China’s ecological civilization construction system, but also provides information for the provincial ecological civilization construction in developing countries.