Quantifying embodied cultivated land-use change and its socioeconomic driving forces in China

Abstract

In recent decades, with the growth of population and the acceleration of urbanization in China, cultivated land resources have become increasingly scarce, and cultivated land embodied in trade has become more and more important to areas with insufficient arable land. The measurement of embodied cultivated land is critical to explore the land use profile and understand the social and environmental issues related to land. However, few studies have explored the embodied cultivated land change and its socio-economic driving forces. Therefore, this study tracks the cultivated land embodied in products and serves traded between 30 provinces and 8 regions in China, adopting a multi-regional input-output model. We also identify the determinants of the changes in embodied cultivated land use through the structural decomposition analysis (SDA). Here we found that more than 80% of total cultivated land consumption in Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing is satisfied by other provinces, indicating that the more economically developed a province is, the less self-sufficient it will be with respect to the land required to support its consumption. The average proportion of embodied cultivated land among Chinese provinces is shown to have decreased from 41.39% in 2007 to 35.35% in 2012, indicating that dependence on cultivated land among Chinese provinces increased over this period. The results also highlight the fact that the most affluent regions in China, including the South Coast, Central Coast, and Beijing–Tianjin, have the highest imports of cultivated land embodied in products from the underdeveloped central and western regions. Further, our SDA results reveal that in most provinces, changes in embodied cultivated land can be attributed to the factors of cultivated land-use intensity and consumption volume. This paper helps determine where the responsibility for land consumption lies and provides data support for the construction of a land governance system, which helps to achieve environmental equity in the context of regional trade.