Geography and Sustainability (Jun 2022)
Environmental economic geography: Recent advances and innovative development
Abstract
Modern environmental problems are the result of human-environment interaction in the process of industrialization. The relationship between economic development and environmental quality is an important aspect of understanding human-environment interaction and has been widely concerned by multidisciplinary researchers. Economic geography (EG) is a discipline that mainly focuses on the location and connections of economic activities. EG has developed to environmental economic geography (EEG) by incorporating environmental factors into its research framework, considering the operational mechanism of the co-evolution of economy and environment, and the dynamic process of green transition of techno-economic paradigms. Studying the resource and environmental effects of R&D, production, trade, and other aspects of the economic cycle is beneficial to realizing the “greening” economy. This paper traces the background and theoretical development path of EEG and elaborates on the interaction between EEG and other research paradigms on environmental problems. In recent years, the focuses of EEG are as follows: (1) the “location-environment” relationship of production from the perspective of local actors; (2) the “GVC/GPN-environment” relationship of multinational enterprises and space of flows from the perspective of the global network; (3) the “trade/circulation-environment” relationship from the perspective of national linkages; and (4) the co-evolution of the economic system and environment from the perspective of synergistic evolution, with a focus on innovation and institutional forces. The future development trend of EEG is combined with the endogenous growth theory and the sustainable development theory, mainly from the aspects of endogenous, system integration and multi-scale, to explain the differences in environmental issues of different regional economic activities, and to promote the development of EEG theory and interdisciplinary research, strengthening the construction of global and regional sustainable development system.
