China is experiencing rapid growth in urbanization and industrialization. The pace, depth and magnitude of these changes, accompanied by the persistence of past practices threatening to the regional and global environment and human well-being. Sustainability can only be assured with a human ecological understanding of the complex interactions among environmental, economic, political, and social/cultural factors based on ecological civilization. The notion of ecological civilization in China integrates eco-mechanisms of competition, symbiosis, regeneration and self-reliance, respects beliefs, institutions, material and cultural civilization through sustainability-oriented integration and coordination of knowledge, technologies, organizations and behavior that support resource conservation, environmental protection and ecological harmony.
Results/Conclusions
Hangzhou city is one of the top cultural cities in China with 2500 years’ history, 6.8 million people and 16,500km2 area. The city was granted by the central government in 2009 the Eco-civilization demonstration city and decided to push forward an ecopolis campaign from both top down and bottom up. An eco-civilization renaissance plan for next 10 years has been worked out to restore and readjust the relationship between man and nature through rethinking, reform and renovation of cognition, institution, material metabolism and cultural life of the city. The ultimate goal is to achieve harmonious co-existence of nature and people and continuous improvement of ecological infrastructure and functions by transforming institutions, nurturing mechanisms, and the advancement of human society with comprehensive goals of wealth (both economic and ecological), health (both individual and systematic) and faith (both ethical and spiritual). The city civilization is measured by a) eco-quality, the relationship between city patterns and structures; b) eco-efficiency, the level of efficiency and use of the urban metabolic process and functions, or the ratio of the output of products and services to the input of resources, c) eco-vitality, the sustainability of urban ecosystem functioning and vitality and d) eco-integrity, the degree of co-ordination and integration of institutions and mechanisms. Ten big eco-infrastructure projects and 1250 eco-engineering projects have been carried out in areas such as free-bicycle service system, eco-agriculture and eco-industrial transformation, sustainable consumption, eco-community, wetland restoration, rural sewage treatment, municipal wastes regeneration, eco-cemetery, eco-mapping. Up to now, 30% and 70% of its townships have met the State and Provincial ecopolis standards respectively, and 6 counties/districts were granted as eco-counties.