China’s rural industrialization has been a major driver for its rapid economic growth during the recent decades,but its myriad environmental risks are yet to be fully understood.Based on a comprehensive national land-use data set,our study shows that the area of China’s rural industrial land(RIL)quadrupled during 1990–2015,reaching 39338 km2 in 2015,comparable to urbanization in magnitude but with a much greater degree of landscape fragmentation which implies stronger ecological and environmental impacts.About 91%of the protected areas in the central China were within 50 km from rural industrial land,thus exposed to industrial disturbances.Accelerated rural industrial land expansion,particularly in regions under high geo-hazard risks,led to dramatically increased environmental risks,threatening the safety and health of both rural industrial workers and residents.Moreover,negative effects from rural industrial land expansion could partially offset the crop production growth in recent decades.The underprivileged rural population in the west bears a disproportionally large share of the increased environmental risks.China urgently needs to design and implement sustainable policies to restrict and reshape its rural industrialization.This study aims to inspire policy makers and researchers to rethink the current model of industrial expansion and improve rural industrial land planning,which is important for achieving the sustainable development goals of China.
Chi ZhangWenhui KuangJianguo WuJiyuan LiuHanqin Tian
China has experienced an unprecedented urbanization and industrialization in the past decades. In this research, we examined the dynamics of construction lands and impervious surface areas (ISA) based on land use/cover change and ISA datasets between 2000 and 2008, which were provided by the national resources and environmental remote sensing information platform. The results indicated that the construction areas and ISA increased by 3468.30 and 2212.24 km 2 /a in this period primarily due to the implementation of national macro-development strategies and fast-growing economy. In 2008, ISA accounted for 0.86% of the total land area in China. Urban land areas increased by 43.46% between 2000 and 2008. The annual growth rate of 1788.22 km 2 /a in this period was 2.18 times that in the 1990s. In particular, urban ISA increased by 53.30% between 2000 and 2008 with an annual growth rate of 1348.85 km 2 /a. During the 8 years, the ISA in China increased rapidly, especially in the Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan Metropolitan Region, Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, and the western China region. The increasing ISA may influence potentially water environmental quality in the major basins. In particular, the number of subbasins having ISA of greater than 10% increased considerably, which were primarily distributed in the Haihe River, Yangtze River and Pearl River basins. In 2008, 14.42% of the basin areas were affected by the increased ISA.
KUANG WenHuiLIU JiYuanZHANG ZengXiangLU DengShengXIANG Bao
This study investigated the regional differences of China′s urban land expansion from the late 1980s to the year of 2008, based on the spatio-temporal analysis of CLCD (China′s land cover/land use database) datasets which were mainly produced from remote sensing imagery data. A newly defined urbanization level index (UI), based on urban land area, is proposed to describe Chinese urban expansion process at 1 kilometer, provincial, regional, and na-tional scales, together with the absolute urban expansion index (UEa) and the relative urbanization expansion index (UEr). The results indicate that the percentages of total land area occupied by urban in the late 1980s, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2008 were approximately 0.25%, 0.32%, 0.33%, 0.43% and 0.52% of China′s total land area, respectively. Between the late 1980s and 2008, the total urban expansion in the mainland of China was 2.645 × 104 km2, resulting in an annual urban expansion area of about 1322.7 km2/yr, with the UEr of 111.9%. This study also finds that there has been an obvious spatial gradient of urbanization ratio running from the east coast to the west inland, and the urbanization gaps among different regions have persisted over the past two decades. The study also reveals obvious temporal varia-tions of the urbanization rates. There was very little urban growth during the period of 1995-2000 due to the governmental policy factors.
