Land-use dynamics and flood risk in the hinterland of the Pearl River Delta: The case of Foshan City

Abstract

This study examines land-use change and flood risk in the rapidly urbanizing Foshan City, a typical hinterland city in the Pearl River Delta. On the basis of classification of Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery, and further GIS-based spatial analysis, the paper determines that, between 1988–2003, massive land-use and -cover change (LUCC) occurred in this region. During the drastic land-use change, the loss of river area was much lower than that of other land-use types. In this region, appropriately 57.89% of water area was converted to the other land types; 46.65% was converted to new dyke-ponds, farmland, and built-up area, whereas the proportion of the other land types converted to water was only 42.97%. Nearly 15% of total water loss was in land for human use, which represents the degradation of the buffering capacity of the water systems to rainstorms. Further, driven by the pressure of urbanization, drastic changes in land use have resulted in significant alternation of hydrological conditions of the river systems, which, in turn, have potentially caused the higher flood risk in more populous urban areas in the sub-delta plain. Therefore, rational land-use policies should be implemented to give maximum returns while minimizing adverse impacts of flooding.