Measuring urban environmental performance in China: A Euclidean distance function approach

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science and Policy
• Urban Sustainability
• Environmental Economics

Background:

• Air pollution presents a significant challenge to urban sustainability, often creating a conflict between environmental protection and economic activities.
• Existing methods for assessing urban environmental performance may lead to arbitrary results and flawed managerial insights.
• A need exists for a robust approach to evaluate and improve how cities manage their environmental impact while fostering economic development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and apply a novel method for measuring urban environmental performance using the Euclidean distance function.
• To analyze the environmental performance of Chinese key environmental protection cities.
• To provide insights for urban governments to identify factors of poor performance and set tailored objectives for improvement.

Main Methods:

• Development of a new approach to measure environmental performance based on the Euclidean distance function.
• Endogenous allocation of optimization pathways to individual emitters, avoiding external estimation biases.
• Application of the method to assess environmental performance in Chinese key environmental protection cities.

Main Results:

• Significant heterogeneity was observed in the environmental performance estimates and the endogenous optimization pathways across different cities.
• The study identified that for most cities, a dual objective of prioritizing specific emission reductions while increasing industrial output value is optimal.
• The developed approach successfully avoids arbitrary estimation results and distorted managerial implications.

Conclusions:

• The novel Euclidean distance-based approach offers a reliable tool for assessing urban environmental performance.
• Urban governments can utilize these findings to understand specific drivers of environmental underperformance.
• Tailored strategies focusing on emission reduction and economic output are recommended for enhancing urban environmental quality and achieving sustainability goals.