Comprehensive evaluation of environmental dimension reduction of multi-type islands: a sustainable development perspective

In recent years, the sustainable development of islands has attracted increasing attention from countries all over the world. An important prerequisite for promoting sustainable development is to understand the foundation and sustainable development potential of islands. Constructing index systems and models is an important means of evaluating the sustainability of islands. This study used factor analysis (FA) to construct an indicator system and set weights. Thirty-eight indicators were set from both natural and social directions to evaluate the sustainable development of seven typical islands in China. The FA removed the 10 indicators that were too relevant, and the 28 effective indicators were reduced into 9 main factors for evaluation. The results showed that the evaluation results are in line with the actual development of the island, which verifies the applicability of the model to different types of islands. The study also found that the changing trends of island social sustainability, tourism sustainability, ecological sustainability, resource sustainability, and economic sustainability are consistent. The value of fully balanced islands is higher than that of unbalanced or undeveloped islands. Among the seven islands, social islands have the highest total value, and ecological islands have the lowest total value.