Abstract
Human well-being can be affected by the loss of ecosystem services from conversion of agricultural lands. Uncovering negative ecological consequences of rural-urban conversion is important for regulating rural-urban land conversion. This paper evaluates the impacts of rural-urban land conversion on the ecological well-being of different interest groups in China and makes policy recommendations for mitigating them. This research empirically quantifies and compares changes in the ecological well-being of rural and urban residents due to rural-urban land conversion and examines how transformation factors affect such changes in Hubei, China using the Fuzzy Synthetic Evaluation Model. Results show that compared with urban residents, rural resident ecological well-being level declines more obviously with rural-urban land conversion. Two socio-demographic characteristics, age and education level, as well as zoning characteristics, influence both rural and urban resident well-being changes. It is argued that there is a need for quantitative measurement of agricultural ecosystem services changes and that the construction of ecological compensation policies in areas undergoing rural-urban land conversion is essential for regulating rural-urban land conversion and for maintaining resident ecological well-being.
Highlights
Humans are dependent upon the services provided by nature and unless we effectively account for the range of values from ecosystems in our efforts to protect the environment, we cannot sustain human well-being [1,2]
According to the actual situation obtained through the survey, the membership values of rural resident ecological well-being indices including satisfaction with air quality, satisfaction with water quality, rural life nostalgia and children’s rural experiences are all set as 0.5 which means that the state of rural resident ecological well-being mentioned above is neither good nor bad before rural-urban land conversion and the membership values of their ecological pollution-related diseases is set as 1 which means they did not get diseases due to ecological environment pollution
Rural-urban land conversion in the process of urbanization in China causes a sharp decrease in agricultural land, resulting in the loss of its original ecosystem services
Summary
Humans are dependent upon the services provided by nature and unless we effectively account for the range of values from ecosystems in our efforts to protect the environment, we cannot sustain human well-being [1,2]. It presents a challenge to the ecological system because many ecosystem services provided by agricultural land are lost in the process of conversion, which can be described as the negative external ecological effects of rural-urban land conversion [9,10,11,12,13]. Such losses in human well-being have received increasing attention in economic analysis and public policy making, based on the ecosystem services functions as well as human well-being indicators made in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) [14,15,16,17]. This paper constructs an ecological well-being index for residents, quantifies the changes in ecological well-being of residents caused by rural-urban land conversion and examines the impact of transformation factors (socio-demographic characteristics and zoning characteristics) on these changes for rural and urban residents
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