Emergy-Ecological Footprint Hybrid Method Analysis of Industrial Parks Using a Geographical and Regional Perspective

Over the past 30 years of rapid development, industrial parks have been an important sustained resource for economic development in China. However, due to economic yield-oriented policy and deficient scientific planning, excessive resource consumption and environmental pollution caused by industrial activities in industrial parks has led to ecological degradation and loss in the local areas. To respond to this issue, many researchers have focused on studying the overall efficiency of industrial parks from the perspective of metabolism of material and energy and have proposed some methods such as life cycle assessment, system of environmental economic accounting (SEEA), material flow analysis, and emergy synthesis, which indeed have improved the methods of evaluating industrial activities shift from only an economic perspective to a more comprehensive direction. However, these approaches have only focused on the efficiency of industrial activities while ignoring ecological conditions of the local areas. This article addressed this issue by proposing an emergy-ecological footprint hybrid model to show how this method could be applied to demonstrate both the energy metabolism of industrial parks' activities and ecological capacity of the local areas. We took the Shenyang economic technological development area (SETDA) and the Fuzhou Qingkou investment zone (FZQKIZ) as case studies to validate this method. Results showed that although the environmental burden of SETDA was heavier than FZQKIZ, the ecological capacity of surplus for SETDA was also stronger than FZQKIZ, which caused ecological surplus of SETDA compared with FZQKIZ. This study indicated that we should pay more attention to ecological capacity of the local areas surrounding industrial parks rather than only focusing on environmental impacts caused by industrial activities.