Toward constructing an eco-account of cultivated land by quantifying the resources flow and eco-asset transfer in China

Abstract

As an artificial and natural coupling system, cultivated land effectively link the socio-ecosystem by appearing the mixed outcomes from human’s interactions with nature including resource consumption, food security, urban growth, environmental pollution emission, land use change, and developmental policies. However, there still exists many problems that the impacts of human activities on environment are hard to assess and the responsibilities are difficult to allocate when discussing the cultivated land protection, despite the towards constant efforts. This paper tries to construct an eco-account of cultivated land by integrating resources utilization into socio-economic activities, as it indeed provides assistance to practical issues and also is a global trend of environmental-economic accounting. To achieve this, the multi-regional input-output table was used as the important tool that can be considered as the proxy of socio-economic system. The cultivated land is regarded to be embodied and transferred in the economic trade of products and services. We quantify the ecological footprint and ecosystem services flows of cultivated land, build the link between the actual consumption and the physical depletion, and identify the supplier and demander of cultivated land among regions in China. The results show that: 1) The embodied cultivate land in the final consumption presents difference in terms of 31 regions and consumption categories. The developed areas having higher virtual cultivated land consumption and dependence upon others. 2) The north China is mainly the supplier and south is the demander of cultivated land, and the major resources transfer flow is from the north to south and west to east of China. 3) By assessing the eco-value of cultivated land, a revised matrix table containing the account of cultivated land eco-asset transfer for each region is constructed. The framework of this paper can provide aid of assigning responsibilities concerning cultivated land protection and offer a new view to help find a practicable avenue to the eco-compensation or integrated utilization of cultivated land.