Research on Resilience Evaluation and Prediction of Urban Ecosystems in Plateau and Mountainous Area: Case Study of Kunming City

In the face of increasingly complex urban challenges, a critical question arises: can urban ecosystems maintain resilience, vitality, and sustainability when confronted with external threats and pressures? Taking Kunming—a plateau-mountainous city in China—as a case study, this research constructs an urban ecosystem resilience (UER) assessment model based on the DPSIR (Driving forces, Pressures, States, Impacts, and Responses) framework. A total of 25 indicators were selected via questionnaire surveys, covering five dimensions: driving forces such as natural population growth, annual GDP growth, urbanization level, urban population density, and resident consumption price growth; pressures including per capita farmland, per capita urban construction land, land reclamation and cultivation rate, proportion of natural disaster-stricken areas, and unit GDP energy consumption; states measured by Evenness Index (EI), Shannon Diversity Index (SHDI), Aggregation Index (AI), Interspersion and Juxtaposition Index (IJI), Landscape Shape Index (LSI), and Normalized Vegetation Index (NDVI); impacts involving per capita GDP, economic density, per capita disposable income growth, per capita green space area, and per capita water resources; and responses including proportion of natural reserve areas, proportion of environmental protection investment to GDP, overall utilization of industrial solid waste, and afforestation area. Based on remote sensing and other data, indicator values were calculated for 2006, 2011, and 2016. The entire-array polygon indicator method was used to visualize indicator interactions and derive composite resilience index values, all of which remained below 0.25—indicating a persistent low-resilience state, marked by sustained economic growth, frequent natural disasters, and declining ecological self-recovery capacity. Forecasting results suggest that, under current development trajectories, Kunming’s UER will remain low over the next decade. This study is the first to integrate the DPSIR framework, entire-array polygon indicator method, and Grey System Forecasting Model into the evaluation and prediction of urban ecosystem resilience in plateau-mountainous cities. The findings highlight the ecosystem’s inherent capacities for self-organization, adaptation, learning, and innovation and reveal its nested, multi-scalar resilience structure. The DPSIR-based framework not only reflects the complex human–nature interactions in urban systems but also identifies key drivers and enables the prediction of future resilience patterns—providing valuable insights for sustainable urban development.