The economic and environmental effects of land use transitions under rapid urbanization and the implications for land use management

Abstract

This paper firstly puts forward an analytical framework for the economic and environmental effects of regional land use transitions. Under the certain technical and institutional backgrounds, regional land use morphology changes adaptively with socio-economic development and turns out to be land use transitions at key time points. The transitions above may bring about positive economic effects as well as negative environmental effects. As the negative ones accumulate seriously and arouse public concern, the government will put forward relative management measures and policies to regulate land use activities and balance economic development with environmental protection. When a balance cannot be achieved within the current background, there will be a need to innovate the current technical or institutional conditions. Secondly, this paper takes Shandong province as a case study to conduct an empirical analysis with the latest econometric analysis methods and explores the effective mechanism among land use transitions, economic development, environmental emissions, and land use management according to current developing stages. The results show that urban construction land expansion is a pivotal factor for secondary industry development, as well as a potential factor for regional SO2 emissions. And the current urban land supply institution gets no significant causality with regional SO2 reduction, but significant with the secondary industry development. Finally, the authors argue that the phenomenon abovementioned is inevitable during the regional developing process. But taking future sustainable development strategies into account, the regional land use management need a transition from the demand-oriented “passive” management mode to the supply-oriented “active” management mode. So more research on this topic remains to be done in the future.