Ecological and environmental impacts of mineral exploitation in urban agglomerations

Abstract

The rapid development of the energy and mining industry has supported the industrialization process in China, but it has also caused a series of negative impacts on the ecological environment. As a resource concentration and regional development pivot, evaluating the impact of mineral exploitation on the ecological environment under the scope of urban agglomeration can efficiently mitigate the contradiction between mineral exploitation and ecological environment protection. Therefore, this paper chose 14 urban agglomerations under the nationally planned mining areas as the research object. This paper analyzed the characteristics and spatial distribution of ecological stress in mineral exploitation from multi-aspects, including the ecological base's vulnerability, ecological function, and the stress degree of critical environmental factors. The results of the study show as follows: (1) The distribution of the vulnerability of the ecological base is highly spatial correlated, the Yellow river basin and Yangtze-river basin are clustered with high ecological base vulnerability and low vulnerability urban agglomerations respectively; (2) More than half of the urban agglomerations are stressed by ecological functions, the threats were mainly coming from the water and land resources; (3) Highly stressed cities concentrated in the Yellow-river and Yangtze-river basins, with strong geographical concentration, the impact of mineral exploitation on the ecosystem is profound than water and air environment. (4) Comprehensive stress was the most common type for mineral cities, typically clustered in urban agglomerations with sufficient mineral resources or heavy soil and water loss, presented as a centralized distribution pattern in general. In the end, based on the results, this paper proposed three different control advice for spatial, intensity, and exploitation, respectively, to provide theoretical support and practical solutions for controlling mineral exploitations in urban agglomerations.