IJERPH, Vol. 16, Pages 1434: Developing A Sustainable Urban-Environmental Quality Evaluation System in China Based on A Hybrid Model (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health)

In China, with the acceleration of urbanization, people pay more attention to the quality of urban environment. Air pollution, vegetation destruction, water waste and pollution, and waste sorting have restricted the sustainable development of urban environment. It is important to evaluate the impact of these environmental concerns as a prerequisite to implement an effective urban environmental sustainability policy. The aim of this paper is to establish a system for evaluating sustainable urban environmental quality in China. We extracted six dimensions and 29 criteria for assessing urban sustainable environment. Then, a fuzzy technique and the best worst method were applied to obtain the weights for the dimensions and criteria. Next, grey possibility values were applied to evaluate the sustainable environmental quality of five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou in China. A sensitivity analysis was performed to identify how the ranking of these five cities changed when varying the weights of each criterion. The results show that pollution control, the natural environment, and water management are the three most important dimensions for urban environmental quality evaluation. We suggest that controlling pollutant emissions, strengthening food waste management, improving clean production processes, and utilizing heat energy are the effective measures to improve the urban environment and achieve sustainable urban environmental development.