Measurements study on sustainability of China's mining cities

It is generally considered that the non-renewable mineral resources will be depleted some day. So it is crucial for each mining city to make sustainable use of its mineral resources. And in order to support suitable decision-making of sustainable development for mining cities, it requires measuring its degree of sustainable development of mineral resources and forecasting its developing trend effectively. The purpose of this paper is to establish a scientific and suitable method for measuring the degree of sustainable development of mineral resources (DSDMR) of mining cities well and truly. This study proposes measuring sustainability of mineral resources with an integrated method which synthesizes accelerating genetic algorithms (AGA), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy integrated judgment (FIJ). And a real case is used to demonstrate the method AGA-EAHP-FIJ. The results show that AGA-EAHP-FIJ is a good method for measuring the DSDMR of the mining city. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.