中国人口和富裕对环境的影响

Impacts of Population and Affluence on Environment in China

辨明人类活动各因素对环境影响作用的大小,并依此找寻发展的对策是当前可持续发展研究的核心问题之一.分析了IPAT等式在分解环境影响中人文因素的作用;采用生态足迹作为环境影响的测量指标,利用STIRPAT模型,以1999年中国各省市的截面数据为例,分析了人口数量、富裕程度、现代化及经济区位和自然区位对环境影响的具体作用,并在此基础上探讨了中国各省(市)的技术生态效益.结果表明:人口数量是当前环境影响的一个主要驱动因子,环境影响与人口数量近同比例变化,富裕程度或现代化程度增加也将加剧人类对环境的影响.在观测数据范围内,分析结果不支持存在环境Kuznets曲线的观点.最后分析讨论了不支持存在环境Kuznets曲线的原因及STIRPAT模型的优缺点,并指出社会适应性能力可作为下一步深入研究的方向.

Growing evidence demonstrated that human has dramatically altered the global environment. Identifying the specific forces driving environmental impacts is a hot topic in the field of sustainable development. One key limitation to a precise understanding of anthropogenic impacts is the absence of a set of refined analytic tools. Firstly, the analytic utility of the well-known IPAT identity and its newly advance, including the developed IMPACT identity and STIRPAT model, is assessed. Then the stochastic model in details and illustrated its application are introduced. With STIRPAT, it is easy to determine the population and affluence elasticity of impact, using cross-sectional, time-series data, and the antilog of the residuals in STIRPAT can be interpreted as a specific multiplier of technology on environmental impacts or the eco-efficiency of technology. Secondly, taking China as a case, the anthropogenic driving forces of environmental impacts using the STIRPAT model and cross-sectional data in 1999 is unpacked. The ecological footprint was taken as the index of environmental impacts due to its strength in accounting for impacts wherever they occur geographically and providing a common unit of measurement for comparing diverse types of impacts. A series of index like urbanization rate, economic structure, economic system position and natural location are considered in the empirical model. Among these variables, the social and political variables like economic system position and natural location are coded as dummy variables. The quadratic terms of affluence and urbanization rate are included to examine the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Thirdly, the analysis results show that population has a proportional effect （approximately unit elasticity） on ecological footprint, and affluence monotonically increases the ecological footprint with a relative low degree than population. Natural location appears to affect the ecological footprint, with southern China having considerably lower impact than northern China. At he same time, the technological eco-efficiency of sample provinces was discussed in details. The most important find- ing in the empirical study was that overall finding don＇t support the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Finally we discussed the advantage of using the STIRPAT and analyses the reason why not support the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis in empirical analysis. Based on the analysis of future environmental impacts using estimation model, we put forward that the social adaptation should be taken as the direction of succeeding research.