Abstract:Based on the summary of emergy and exergy, an integrated assessment method was established to evaluate regional sustainable development. Three parts included in this method were natural resources, human resources, and environmental cost. A region was regarded as a compound ecosystem combining society, economy, and the environment. It is an improvement of the exergy evaluation method and can be used in the evaluation of sustainable development and green GDP. After the introduction of the assessment method, the extended exergy account of China was calculated. The results showed that:(1) the sustainable development level has gradually improved from 2006 to 2015, which indicates the improvement of China's resource utilization efficiency; (2) From the perspective of resource, the proportion of natural resource inputs was still the highest, but the ratio has gradually decreased. The proportion of the environmental exergy cost has also decreased. Moreover, the proportion of human resources displayed a rapid increase after 2010. This reflected the increasing labor cost. (3) Without considering interregional import and export, the sustainable development level of Beijing is the highest and Tibet is the lowest in terms of the exergy GDP ratio. In the future, it will be necessary to improve the index of this method to evaluate the sustainable development level.