Identification of urban land use efficiency by indicator-SDG 11.3.1.

Guoyin Cai,Jinxi Zhang,Chaopeng Li,Shu Peng,Mingyi Du,Changshan Wu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0244318

Abstract

Inefficiency in urban land use is one of the problems caused by rapid urbanization. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicator 11.3.1 is designed to test urban land use efficiency. This study employed geospatial and statistical data to compute land use efficiencies from 1990 to 2015 with five 5-year and ten 15-year intervals in Wukang, center of Deqing County, China. A flowchart was designed to extract the built-up lands from multiple data sources. The produced built-up lands were demonstrated to provide good accuracy by constructing an error matrix between the extracted and manually interpreted built-up lands as classified and reference images, respectively. By using the model provided by UN metadata to calculate SDG 11.3.1, the land use efficiencies from 1990 to 2015 were identified in Wukang. Our results indicate that the land use efficiency in Deqing County center is lower than the average of cities around the world, primarily because our in-situ study focused on a county center with larger rural regions than urban areas. Over the long term, urban land use becomes denser as the population grows, which will have a positive impact on the sustainability of urban development. This work is helpful for the local government to balance urban land consumption and population growth.

Highlights

Environmental degradation and social tensions have put societies under severe pressures in the past couple of decades, the growing populations and increasing per capita land consumption are two key drivers [1,2,3,4]
We focused on indicator sustainable development goals (SDGs) 11.3.1, the ratio ( land consumption rate to population growth rate (LCRPGR)) of the land consumption rate (LCR) to population growth (PGR)
Index SDG 11.3.1 is the ratio of the land consumption rate to the population growth rate, which is primarily used to indicate that the urban land use efficiency is globally rapid urbanization [43]

Summary

Introduction

Environmental degradation and social tensions have put societies under severe pressures in the past couple of decades, the growing populations and increasing per capita land consumption are two key drivers [1,2,3,4]. With the rapid development of urbanization, a large proportion of cities have high consumption of suburban green spaces [5]. The global land rush—the phenomenon of domestic and transnational companies, governments, and individuals buying or leasing large tracts of farm lands, green spaces, or other water-pervious surfaces—has emerged as a critical issue, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, over the last decades [7,8,9]. A project jointly completed by the African Union, African Development Bank, and Economic

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