How to minimize the impacts of urban expansion on farmland loss: developing a few large or many small cities?
- PDF / 2,728,678 Bytes
- 13 Pages / 547.087 x 737.008 pts Page_size
- 32 Downloads / 185 Views
(0123456789().,-volV) ( 01234567 89().,-volV)
RESEARCH ARTICLE
How to minimize the impacts of urban expansion on farmland loss: developing a few large or many small cities? Guohua Hu . Xia Li . Bing-Bing Zhou . Qun Ma . Xing Meng . Yilun Liu . Yimin Chen . Xiaoping Liu
Received: 27 January 2020 / Accepted: 13 July 2020 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Context In China, large cities are often held to blame for the drastic loss of high-quality farmland. However, others propose that the development of large cities should be prioritized for their scale economy in saving farmland. A policy debate remains regarding which urbanization mode—developing a few large or many small cities—can minimize the impacts of urban expansion on farmland loss. Objective The present study aims to clarify the controversy by quantifying the quantity and quality of urbanization-encroached farmland (UEF) in different sizes of cities. Methods We proposed two indexes to quantify the UEF among different sizes of cities during 2000–2010: ‘‘the UEF area per urban population G. Hu X. Li (&) X. Meng Key Lab of Geographic Information Science (Ministry of Education), School of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200241, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] B.-B. Zhou (&) School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] Q. Ma School of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai 200234, People’s Republic of China
growth’’ and ‘‘the average potential yield of UEF’’. Furthermore, we proposed a spatial prioritization matrix to facilitate place-based policy design for UEF management. Results The super large cities (SLC) consumed the least UEF area per urban population growth and also the lowest average potential yield of UEF. However, there were large variations within city categories in both the quality and quantity dimensions. Farmland loss to urban expansion is determined by a city’s biophysical and socio-political conditions. Conclusions Our analyses show that urban growth of SLC consumed smaller quantity of farmland when accommodating a certain amount of urban population. Containing the development of large cities in the name of food security is ineffective, which will cause double
Y. Liu College of Natural Resources and Environment, Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Land Use and Consolidation, and Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Land and Resources for Construction Land Transformation, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou 510642, People’s Republic of China Y. Chen X. Liu School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou 510275, People’s Republic of China
123
Landscape Ecol
failures in farmland preservation and urban development. As the impacts of urban expansion on farmland loss are highly place-variant and urban sustainability is more than just food security, place-based policies following the landscape sustainability perspective are needed to address urban encroachment of f
Data Loading...
