Study on the Population Carrying Capacity in Northeast China

This paper uses economy, energy, resources and environmental monitoring data to analyse the natural economic condition in Northeast China, and then bases on studies of sub-resources to analyse population carrying capacity.

First of all, this paper analyzes the current land capacity in Northeast China. The comparison farmland data of from 1993 to 2008 shows that the land resources are relatively abundant in Northeast China, so the land carrying capacity in this region is strong.

Second, we use the principal component analysis to study the water carrying capacity. The results show that the first principal component is the unit of the per capita GDP, urbanization rate, water emissions per capita GDP, and the second principal component is the unit of per capita water resources and arable land water resources.

Third, this paper uses ecological footprint to study the ecological carrying capacity of Northeast China. In 2007, ecological deficit per capita reached 2.115 which indicated that Northeast China is in serious ecological deficit status.This paper builds a model of three programs to calculate ecological optimum population size. In 2007 the maximum value of ecological optimum population is 105.449 million, slightly lower than the existing population.