Evaluation on geological environment carrying capacity of mining city – A case study in Huangshi City, Hubei Province, China

•Construction of GECC system for mining cities.•Improvement of evaluation weight method.•Driver factors analysis.•Mine dynamic monitoring. With the accelerated urbanization and increasingly intense human activities, geological environment degradation has become a key factor hindering the development of green cities. Understanding the current status of the regional geological environment can help us to propose effective means of geological environment controls and scientifically guide regional development planning. In this work, we take Huangshi City in Hubei Province as the study area and constructs a geological environment carrying capacity (GECC) evaluation system based on a total of 17 evaluation indicators from geological, ecological and social environments. Then we use the cloud model to improve analytic hierarchy process (AHP) for multiple experts to make decisions, and select the fuzzy affiliation function to quantify each index, finally the GIS spatial analysis is used to make a comprehensive geological environment carrying capacity evaluation of Huangshi. The results show that: The overall state of Huangshi's GECC is good, the area with bad GECC is concentrated in the northeastern and central parts of the study area where there are mining and geohazards. We analyzed the shortcomings of each county and found that the limiting factors are different at county scale. By analyzing the regression relationship between the carrying capacity results and various factors, we concluded that geohazards and mining are the driving factors for the current state of carrying capacity. Therefore, we propose an efficient approach to dynamic mineral monitoring base on Google Earth Engine (GEE) and corresponding development suggestions. These results can provide support for protecting geo-environment and regional development.