Abstract
In order to fully explore the fertilizer use intensity and its potential threats to the ecological environment, this paper has studied the decomposition of fertilizer use intensity and its environmental risk in China’s grain production. Based on the statistical data collected from 10 provinces during 2004–2015 in China’s grain producing areas, this paper has analyzed the effect of fertilizer use intensity from a regional perspective. The environmental risk assessment model considers some factors such as the fertilizer application safety thresholds use efficiency, multiple cropping index, and environmental impact weight. The fertilizer application safety thresholds are calculated on the target output of local food crops. The results show that: (1) during 2004–2015, the fertilizer use intensity shows an increasing trend in China’s grain producing areas, and the intensity is significantly higher than the upper limit of the international safety fertilization; (2) the cumulative contribution rate of the increase of fertilizer use intensity caused by regional fertilizer use efficiency and grain planting structure adjustment are 57.03% and 1.81% respectively; (3) in 2015, China’s grain producing areas’ environmental risk index of phosphorus and potash was low, with the values in these two provinces being quite different and indicating the characteristics of aggregation and distribution. Therefore, the Chinese government should unswervingly encourage the application of some technology that could save fertilizer and increase efficiency, establish environmental risk monitoring and control systems, and improve relevant policies and regulations.
Highlights
Fertilizer use is one of the important land management practices that alleviated nitrogen limitation in grain production [1]
Even though the International Fertilizer Industry Association (IFA) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) have provided the annual fertilizer consumption data since 1961, most of these data were applied to the multiple bottom-up nutrient budget analyses [19,20,21], while the influencing factors of intensity and environmental risk in fertilizer use have been overlooked
After analyzing the variation characteristics of fertilizer use intensity, we find that, fertilizer use intensity has some fluctuations in the years from 2004 to 2015, it still shows an increasing trend in the grain production process
Summary
Fertilizer use is one of the important land management practices that alleviated nitrogen limitation in grain production [1]. In order to meet the food demand of an ever-increasing world population, most countries have shown an overload use of inorganic fertilizer in agricultural production [7,8]. A large number of empirical studies have shown that the excessive fertilizer use has been a source of agricultural non-point source pollution in addition to causing numerous environmental and ecological problems which include greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution, changes of soil properties, declining productivity, deterioration of agricultural production quality, as well as loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. Even though the International Fertilizer Industry Association (IFA) and the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) have provided the annual fertilizer consumption data since 1961, most of these data were applied to the multiple bottom-up nutrient budget analyses [19,20,21], while the influencing factors of intensity and environmental risk in fertilizer use have been overlooked
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