Sustainable Development in Jiangsu Province, China: A Study on Tourism Urbanization

A new study on sustainability research provides valuable insights into sustainable development in Jiangsu Province, China. The research, conducted by researchers at Jinling Institute of Technology, focuses on the tourism urbanization process in the developed coastal province. The study constructs a novel evaluation system integrating tourism industry, urbanization, and ecological environment subsystems, providing a methodological framework for optimizing regional sustainable development.

Key Takeaways:

• The study found that all 13 prefecture-level cities in Jiangsu Province achieved intermediate coupling, confirming high subsystem interrelation, with spatial coupling displaying a distinct bimodal pattern.
• The overall coordination levels remained low, with most cities in low-to-intermediate ranges, indicating a need for balanced tourism-urbanization-ecology interactions.
• Six coordination combinations emerged, with Southern Jiangsu achieving coordinated development, while Northern and Central cities exhibited disorder.
• The study proposes differentiated strategies for regions undergoing rapid urbanization, prioritizing infrastructure development and ecological conservation to prevent low-level subsystem constraints.
• Regions with stabilized urbanization rates should leverage tourism's driving effects on urbanization and ecology to foster high-level synergy.

Statistics:

• The study used the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for initial weighting and entropy method optimization for scientific parameter weighting.
• The research calculated coupling and coordination degrees among subsystems, with a median segmentation method identifying developmental stages.
• The AHP-entropy-coupling coordination model was applied to 13 prefecture-level cities, with key findings revealing intermediate coupling among cities, spatial coupling displaying a distinct bimodal pattern, and overall coordination levels remaining low.

Sources:

• Assessment of Coupling Coordination of Tourism Urbanization System In Jiangsu Province, China. Journal of Environmental Science and Management, 2025;28(1).
• NewsRx. Researchers at Jinling Institute of Technology Target Sustainable Development (Assessment of Coupling Coordination of Tourism Urbanization System In Jiangsu Province, China). Entertainment & Travel. August 16, 2025; p 433.