Sustainable development of coal cities in Heilongjiang province based on AHP method

The sustainable development of coal mining cities in Heilongjiang province has important effect on the economic stability and development of Heilongjiang, Northeast China, and China at large. To further the sustainable development evaluation system of coal mining cities in Heilongjiang province, based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method combined with operational and scientific principles using Saaty's 1-9 scale method to construct the judgment matrix from five aspects, such as economic development and environmental quality, this paper establishes the comprehensive evaluation index system of sustainable development of coal mining cities in Heilongjiang province, including comprehensive index of industrial economic benefits and the contribution rate of science and technology. In addition, using fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method, a comprehensive evaluation is made on the indices of the four major coal mining cities of Heilongjiang. The result shows that the coal mining cities are not better than Datong of Shanxi province in many indices. The economic development and environment quality are the most important indices of the targeted layer influencing the sustainable development of coal mining cities of Heilongjiang, and their index weights are 0.4358 and 0.2844, respectively. These two indices including comprehensive index of industrial economic benefit and the ratio of environmental protection investment to GDP are the key elements influencing the two aspects. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of China University of Mining & Technology.