Temporal and Spatial Changes in Coupling and Coordinating Degree of New Urbanization and Ecological-Environmental Stress in China

Over the past years, new urbanization in China has accelerated steadily and led to a continuous increase in ecological-environmental (eco-environmental) stress. A deep understanding of the coupling relationship between new urbanization and ecological-environmental stress is essential to benefiting the urban management in making decisions. How to realize the coordinated development of urbanization and the eco-environment is not only the key issue in world economic and social development, but has also been a hot topic of research in recent years. However, the quantitative relationship and the interaction mechanism between the new urbanization and ecological-environmental stress are still unclear. To fill this gap, this study constructed comprehensive assessment indicators for evaluating new urbanization and eco-environmental stress systems to accomplish the following objectives. We aimed to identify the spatial and temporal pattern of coupling and coordinating degree between new urbanization and eco-environmental stress in China during the period of 2005–2016. The degrees of coupling and coordination of new urbanization and eco-environmental stress systems in China in 2005, 2010, and 2016 were calculated at the provincial level. The degrees of coupling and coordination have achieved stable and continuous improvement from 0.389 to 0.484. We further aimed to evaluate the regional coupling and estimate the stage of urbanization at which an optimal outcome could be achieved in order to ensure high-quality urbanization in China. According to the model of coupling and coordination degree, this paper divided the Chinese territory into four area types: well coordination, middle coordination, primary coordination, and reluctance coordination, and about 35% of the provinces belonged to the well and middle coordination types. Lastly, this paper analyzed the spatial pattern and cluster mode of the coupling coordination of new urbanization and eco-environmental stress systems by using ArcGIS and GeoDa. The analysis implied that coupling coordination existed with obvious regional disparity. Moreover, the degrees of coupling coordination of the developed east coastal and middle area were generally higher than those of the undeveloped west area. The findings indicate that for different regions, the reluctance coordination and primary coordination subclass regions should accelerate to realize green transformation, improve the industrial structure, and strengthen the environmental law-enforcing supervision. However, we could not conduct an internal structural analysis. Future research will focus on conducting an internal structural analysis and an element system metrics analysis.