CollectHomepage AdvertisementContact usMessage

Arid Land Geography ›› 2021, Vol. 44 ›› Issue (4): 1141-1152.doi: 10.12118/j.issn.1000–6060.2021.04.26

• Regional Development • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Coupling process and mechanism of urbanization and ecological environment in Kazakhstan

HUANG Jinchuan1,2,3(),NA Ying1,2,3   

  1. 1. Key Laboratory of Regional Sustainable Development Modeling, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
    2. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
    3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
  • Received:2020-03-25 Revised:2020-06-08 Online:2021-07-25 Published:2021-08-02

Abstract:

With the rapid development of global industrialization and urbanization, more and more countries are emphasizing high quality urbanization development and environmental sustainability; however, few dynamic and static studies have conjointly synthetically analyzed the interaction relationship between regional urbanization and the ecological environment. Further, existing studies have rarely included the area from Kazakhstan to Central Asia in quantitative analyses. This paper uses an entropy variation coefficient method and multi-objective fuzzy membership functions to examine Kazakhstan to provide a comprehensive measure of urbanization and the ecological environment and to build a comprehensive index, based on the improved Tapio decoupling analysis model. The urbanization and ecological environment of the static and dynamic coupling relationship was then analyzed. The results indicate that the Kazakhstan urbanization space differentiation is largely influenced by industrial structures and population migration. The oil exploration area, with industry leading the regional urbanization level, is higher. The ecological environment space differentiation is influenced by both industrial structures and ecological environment protection. The main conclusions of this paper are as follows. (1) High values of comprehensive urbanization in Kazakhstan are primarily concentrated in the oil exploitation areas in the west and the industrial areas in middle and northeast Kazakhstan, while low values are primarily concentrated in the southern and part of the northern regions, which are characterized by an agricultural economy. (2) High values of the ecological environment comprehensive level are distributed in Nuer Sultan and Almaty, which are dominated by the service industry and are highly responsive to ecological environment protection, while low values are primarily distributed in the western oil and gas exploitation area with relatively active carbon emissions. (3) The dynamic coupling relationship between urbanization and the ecological environment in Kazakhstan from 2000 to 2015 is primarily in the states of strong decoupling, weak decoupling, strong negative decoupling, declining decoupling, and expansion negative decoupling. Under the influence of industrial structures and the responsiveness of the ecological environment, the dynamic coupling relationship kept changing from 2000 to 2015. Summarizing the coupling mechanism, it is found that the response to ecological environmental protection, urbanization, the total amount of agricultural water, and the international external economic environment are the main driving factors affecting the coupling relationship between urbanization and the ecological environment in Kazakhstan. This paper has an important theoretical significance for high quality development and the sustainable development of urbanization in Kazakhstan. In addition, it has important practical significance for China in the context of making targeted investments in Belt and Road countries.

Key words: ecological-environment, comprehensive urbanization, coupling procedure, decoupling model, Kazakhstan