Abstract
Land use change is the most prominent feature of Chinese urbanisation. In China, the expansion of land consumed for urban development is inevitable given the rapid increases in the urban economy and urban population, but also in meeting the population’s increasing demand for better quality of life. This paper is based on a research study of Wujiang district in Suzhou, which is considered representative of many of the rapid urbanisation areas within the nation. The objective is to develop an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of land use change and how this change contributes to environmental deterioration, as assessed by changes in the ecosystem service value (ESV). In this study, ESV is defined as the environmental products and functions provided for human well-being. Based on local planning documents, Landsat TM remote-sensing images and field surveys, the research analyses the cost to the environment when traditional land uses are transformed into urbanisation. The research demonstrates that conversion to urban land use which ignores the limit and capacity of the environment can generate significant environmental costs, as assessed by ESV, which in turn, can lead to a deterioration of quality of life for inhabitants, the exact opposite of the original intention. The research demonstrates that by mapping the spatial distribution of ecological service values, ESV can be used as a guide to urban sustainable development.
Highlights
To deal with environmental problems and promote sustainable development, ecosystem service value (ESV) is applied to set up baselines and to provide evidence for the definition and classification of urban development and ecological protection land uses, which are significant in the planning process
Using Wujiang district in Suzhou as a case study area that is thought to be typical of many urbanisation experiences around the country, a method has been developed and tested of transforming major coefficients of change to local conditions
The analysis of the impacts on the ecological environment that has been presented is based on ecosystem service values (ESV)
Summary
The assessment of ecosystem services has become a popular and useful method of measuring such benefits and identifying and analysing the degree of interdependence between human activities and the impacts on nature (Jørgensen 2010). It is important to document their value to ensure an urbanisation that reflects people’s preferences and the services they provide and, as a result, there have been an increasing number of quantitative estimations of ecosystem services Research in this field is still constrained by the poor quality of data.
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