Measuring Green Divide: Evaluation System for Spatial Justice of China’s Green Transition - The Case of Guangdong Province

This research explores the spatial justice issues in China's green transition in the context of global climate change and the growing environmental crisis. Green transition involves energy structure adjustment, industrial upgrading and fair distribution of social resources, and is an important way to achieve sustainable development. However, in the process of green transition, the unbalanced and insufficient development between urban and rural areas and regions has become an important factor constraining China's green transition, especially in the areas of resource allocation, fair participation and environmental protection. This paper constructs a spatial justice evaluation system to assess the spatial equity in the process of green transformation in Guangdong Province. The study first describes the theoretical framework of green transition and spatial justice and its practices globally and in China through literature review and policy analysis. Next, based on the five-level and three-category system of China's territorial spatial planning, it explores the embodiment of green transition and spatial justice in different levels of planning. Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, this paper selects Guangdong Province as a case study to assess the development level of spatial justice in the process of green transformation in Guangdong Province in 2022 and reveals the pattern of its spatial and temporal evolution through spatial autocorrelation analysis. The results of the study show that Guangdong Province exhibits significant regional imbalances in the process of green transformation, and there are large gaps between some urban agglomerations and regions in the development of green industries, resource use efficiency, and the equalisation of public services. Through the constructed evaluation system, this paper reveals the key factors affecting spatial justice in Guangdong Province and proposes improvement strategies based on the framework of territorial spatial planning, aiming to promote fair and inclusive development in the process of green transformation in Guangdong Province. The research in this paper provides a theoretical basis for the formulation of more scientific and reasonable policies, as well as a useful reference for the practice of spatial justice in green transformation in other regions.