The drivers of land use change in the migration area, Three Gorges Project, China: Advances and prospects

Abstract

This paper reviewed existing literatures on land use change since the demonstration phase of the Three Gorges Project and found that reservoir inundation, migration resettlement, urban relocation, and post-supporting construction were first paid more attention to, when analyzing the driving forces of land use change in the migration area. However, at the post-migration period (the end of migration resettlement), above-mentioned drivers had not obviously driven land use change, but the evolutions of “migration demands” replacing them increasingly became the major drivers of land use change in the migration area. Therefore, the future priority fields of land use explanations in the migration area, Three Gorges Project were (1) identifying the corresponding relationships between the spatial distributions of land use change and migration resettlement and indigenous inhabitants; (2) understanding the change of “migration demands” and their causing “indigenous inhabitants’ demands” being how to drive land use transforms; (3) finding the driving processes of the conflict and exclusion between immigrants and indigenous inhabitants, and the transfer of immigrants and indigenous inhabitants on land use change; and (4) measuring the dynamic feedback of “migration demands” at different stages on the processes, directions and their corresponding impacts of land use change in order to building the coupling framework among “migration demands”, driver behaviors, and land use. This paper presents a new access for the explanation of land use change and also supplies scientific proofs to obtain adaptive decision-making to optimize land use patterns in the migration area, Three Gorges Project.