PARENT SESSION
Symposium 7: Multi-scale integration for ecological sustainability: Approaches and applications
Organized by: R Wang and Jianguo(Jack) Liu
Tuesday, August 9, 1:30 PM - 5:00 PM, Meeting Room 517 A, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal

Social-Economic-Natural Complex Ecosystem approach and its application to multi-scale sustainability planning and management in China.

Wang, Rusong,

ABSTRACT- Grounded in ancient Chinese human ecological philosophy, a concept of Social-Economic-Natural Complex Ecosystem (SENCE) has been developed by Ma and Wang to address the eco-sustainability of human dominated ecosystems. Its social subsystem includes technology, institution and behavior. The economic subsystem includes the functional components of production, consumption, reduction, transportation and regulation. The natural subsystem consists of the five traditional Chinese Elements: metal (minerals), wood (living organism), water, fire (energy) and soil (nutrients and land). SENCE sustainability can only be assured with a human ecological understanding of the complex interactions among natural, economic, and social factors and with careful planning and management of its temporal and spatial processes, patterns and orders. A campaign of ecopolis development at different scales from town to Province is currently being carried out in China. Its goal is to enhance eco-sustainability by coupling an ecologically vivid landscape (ecoscape), totally functioning industry (eco-industry) and systematically responsible culture (eco-culture) together with local decision makers and stakeholders. A SENCE based combinatory model consisting of a mechanism model (driving forces of energy, money, power and spirit, and cybernetics of competition, symbiosis, circulation and self-reliance), planning model (pan-objective ecological programming and conjugate ecological planning) and management model (eco-service, eco-metabolism and eco-institution monitoring and supervision, and capacity building) was developed and implemented in the 1990s. Introduced here are some cases of Hainan eco-province, Yangzhou eco-city, Dafeng eco-county and Rizhao eco-industrial park development, which have gained significant progress towards sustainable development through the SENCE based combinatory model.

Key words: sustainability, social-economic-natural complex ecosystems, planning and management, China