An approach to quantify the dependence of economy on resource efficiency: A case study in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of north China.

The improvements of resource efficiency are crucial for economic development of a city. Currently, the variations of utilization efficiency of ecological resources have been studied much, but whether the efficiency has been good enough for driving the economy, is still unknown. Here, we introduced an efficiency dependence index (EDI) to assess the effects of utilization efficiency of land, energy and water resources on economy and evaluated the promotion potentials of resource efficiency. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region of north China was selected to validate the method. First, a non-collinear index system was built. After that, the EDI and the score of resource efficiency (SRE) index were constructed based on the generalized linear regression method. The main results were: (1) The efficiency contributions to economy in primary industry (4 of 13 cities) were far weaker than those in secondary industry (10 of 13 cities). (2) Water efficiency of primary industry in developed cities need further promotions. Energy efficiency needs more improvements especially in medium and small cities in both primary and secondary industries. (3) The efficiency utilization patterns of effective efficiency (EE), potential efficiency (PE) and no efficiency (NE) were categorized, and there were 26 of 65 (40%) counts of indicators performed EE, 31% counts of indicators presented PE and 29% counts of indicators showed NE. The improvement of water efficiency was the key driver to promote the resource efficiency. (4) By comparing current and ideal resource efficiency levels (via SRE), it showed that only 1 city reached to 80% of the ideal efficiency, 3 cities showed 70%, 4 cities showed 60% and 5 cities reached to less than 50% of the ideal resource efficiency. Policy suggestions of optimizing energy structure and pay attention to the comprehensiveness of resource efficiency were provided. This paper could serve as a reference for resource management.