Yansui Liu

• Professor，TWAS Fellow
• Head of Department at Chinese Academy of Sciences

The world has experienced a rapid expansion of human settlements in both urban and rural areas in recent decades, yet the unequal impacts of this construction on global food security remain unclear. In this study, we delineated the global-scale expansion of urban-rural settlements at a fine resolution from 1985 to 2020 and quantified their uneven i...

Optimizing ecosystem services (ESs) necessitates the identification of suitable management units and zoning strategies, which fundamentally depend on a comprehensive understanding of the complex interactions of ESs across scales. However, the absence of precise cross-scale research methodologies has impeded progress in this field. This study introd...

Climate change brings new challenges to the sustainable development of agriculture in the new era. Accurately grasping the patterns of climate change impacts on agricultural systems is crucial for ensuring agricultural sustainability and food security. Taking the Loess Plateau (LP), China as an example, this study used a coupling coordination degre...

The rapid expansion of cities seriously threatens the sustainable development of agriculture in China. Exploring the evolution law and influencing mechanism of agricultural regional system in the process of urbanization is of great significance for promoting sustainable development of agriculture in China. This paper takes the Loess Plateau (LP) as...

Climate warming and intensified extreme climate weathers have diverse influence on global food production over past decades. However, there is insufficient understanding of the adaptation in future climate change to fully release food production potential on the existing cultivated land. Here we separately simulated spatio-temporal evolution of per...

Balancing intensive development with biodiversity conservation is critical for ecological sustainability. In the Loess Hilly-Gully region, which has experienced significant environmental changes from 1980 to 2020, land use changes are vital for ecosystem service maintenance. However, these processes are susceptible to environmental stressors such a...

人地系统是人类活动与地理环境相互联系、相互作用而形成的复杂适应系统, 具有综合性、区域性、复杂性、开放性、动态性特征. 人地系统空间识别、类型诊断和强度评估是现代人地系统科学和地理学综合研究的核心内容, 是科学认知人地系统演化过程与机理、服务支撑人地系统协调与可持续发展决策的重要基础. 本文基于人地关系地域系统理论和地理学“三主三分”方法, 构建了自上而下的现代人地系统识别-诊断-评估科学认知体系, 综合土地利用、人口密度、夜间灯光指数、感兴趣点等多源空间数据, 利用决策树、空间聚类、人类足迹强度指数等定量模型方法, 开展了2000~2020年中国人地系统地域空间分区、主要类型分类和作用强度分级探测研究. 结果表明: (1) 中国人地系统面积占比由53.9%增至54.1%, 基本稳定在54%...

Agricultural geography is an interdisciplinary field that combines agricultural science and geographical science. Agricultural Geographic Engineering (AGE) represents a deeper and more systematic application of the interdisciplinary study of geography and engineering in the modern agriculture and rural areas. With the innovation and development of...

Exploring the coupling coordinated level of rural population-land-industry (PLI) and its underlying driving mechanism contributes to the scientific decision-making on rural sustainable development. This study assessed the coupling coordinated level of PLI based on an improved evaluation index system and then revealed the regional differentiation an...

Rural areas are at the forefront of achieving sustainable development goals, and elite actors tend to be the most influential local decision-makers in rural development. Nevertheless, improving the effectiveness of governance by elites and avoiding or redressing “elite capture” remain key challenges for sustainable rural development globally. This...

The systematic decline of rural areas in the process of rapid urbanization has become a global trend, creating greater challenges for sustainable rural development. As the spatial projection of socio-economic development and living environment in rural areas, the continuous tracking of rural settlements (RUS) is crucial to quantify the imbalance of...

Sustainable development in impoverished areas is still a global challenge owing to trade-offs between development and conservation. There are large poverty-stricken areas (PSAs) in China, which overlap highly with ecologically sensitive areas. China has made great efforts to alleviate poverty over the years. The coordinated relationship between the...

In the context of global advocacy for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agriculture and rural areas as the main carrying place of human production activities, is not only the focus area of SDGs, but also the focus point for the implementation of SDGs. Gully agricultural land and water resources (GALWR) sustainable use in China's Loess Plateau i...

Over the past three decades, China has experienced the largest volumes of urban growth worldwide accompanied by a continued increase in rural built-up areas mainly due to the Hukou system (mainland China’s household registration system, separating urban and rural residents) [1][2], with an average annual increase of 3.23% in urban and 2.73% in rura...

黄河流域生态保护和高质量发展已上升为国家战略。2021年《黄河流域生态保护和高质量发展规划纲要》的发布与实施，促使黄土高原生态建设进入了生态治理成效巩固、经济社会发展转型的关键期。文章系统总结了黄土高原生态建设与社会经济发展的现状特点和主要问题，从生态系统稳定性和可持续性提升、社会经济系统绿色转型、国土空间科学布局、全流域统筹协调治理等方面提出对策建议，为黄土高原乃至黄河流域生态保护和高质量发展提供科技支撑。 The ecological protection and high-quality development of the Yellow River Basin has been prioritized as a national strategy. The release and...

Cropping systems worldwide have been affected by the current trend in global warming and the optimization of cropping systems is an important area of research in the transition of agricultural land. The Loess Plateau is a typical ecologically fragile region with the most serious soil erosion in China. We carried out a field experiment in Yan’an cit...

Scientific field management is an important path to realize ecological production and sustainable development of agriculture. As the main content of field management, nitrogen (N) management is the key to balance the economic and ecological benefits of agricultural production. In the loess hilly-gully region, for the fragile ecological and social s...

The Yellow River Basin (YRB) occupies an important position in China’s socioeconomic development and ecological conservation efforts. Understanding the spatiotemporal characteristics of the relationships among multiple ecosystem services (ESs) and their drivers is crucial for regional sustainable development and human-earth system coordination. Thi...

Soil erosion and slope instability restrict the cutting slopes, especially the high and steep slopes of a construction site. It is difficult for present research of observation experiments and investigation to deal with these problems under climate change. Focusing on gully land consolidation in the loess plateau of China, this paper put forward a...

Increasing the quantity and improving the quality of cropland can alleviate the human-land contradiction and promote the sustainable development of agriculture especially in mountainous areas. With the support of the central government’s policies, Yan’an, Northern Shaanxi, China implemented a major land consolidation engineering project in the loes...

Eco-environmental sustainability is the basis for sustainable development in ecologically fragile areas. Land consolidation plays an important role in coordinating human-land relationships and achieving economic growth and eco-environment protection. Taking the Loess Plateau as the study area, this paper diagnoses the associated eco-environmental p...

Traditional plain agricultural areas are the core areas to ensure national food security, and are currently facing multiple pressures of economic development, arable land protection and ecological protection, so the synergy between comprehensive land consolidation and rural transformation development is an effective path to realize rural revitaliza...

The new farmland created by land consolidation often faces the problems of poor soil structure and low productivity, which cause its potential degradation risk. The Gully Land Consolidation Project (GLCP) significantly increased the quantity of farmland in the Chinese Loess Plateau (LP), but the research on the method of simultaneously improving so...

Sustainably feeding an increasing population is a grand challenge in the context of climate change and rapid urbanization. Over the past decades, there has been a remarkable trend in paddy expansion into the mid-high latitude regions of Northeast Asia, especially in China. Yet, knowledge on paddy expansion patterns and corresponding responses to cl...

Cropland area and cropping frequency play very crucial roles in determining regional food production. However, rapid urbanization accompanied by declining surplus-agricultural labor force has greatly altered patterns of agriculture land use and cropping frequency. Due to lack of continuous cropland and cropland-use intensity maps, our knowledge is...

Water scarcity greatly hinders sustainable development goal agenda and regional agriculture development in dryland regions. As we know, land use and cover changes are strongly responsible for spatial-temporal evolutions of water resource. However, there is little explicit understanding of how spatial patterns of future dryland use will affect the w...

The world is facing a poverty crisis. Despite the great achievements that have been made in poverty alleviation over the past two decades, the extent of poverty in countries along the Belt and Road is still high. Successful poverty reduction in these countries is crucial to meeting the 2030 SDGs. Improving governance to eradicate poverty is a short...

In 2020, the decisive victory of building a moderately well-off society in all aspects means that absolute poverty in rural China has been completely eliminated. Consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty alleviation and establishing a long-term mechanism to solve relative poverty have become key issues in high-quality development of u...

Excessive use of agricultural chemicals and unreasonable utilization of agricultural wastes have led to severe agricultural non-point source pollution (ANPSP) problems in China. Based on the agricultural pollution loads and pollution control strength, the ecological risk index (ERI) was constructed and was used to explore the spatial-temporal patte...

A rich body of literature is stressing the crucial importance of migration and market evolution on the underutilization of housing in cities. Rural housing is unique given its less mature market structure. Drawing on an empirical case of Sunan, the work reported in this paper addresses underlying mechanisms of housing land underutilization in rural...

China has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades. However, rural areas lag behind cities, leading to increased urban-rural economic disparities. As China's traditional agricultural zone, the “Three Mountains and One Beach”(TMOB) area is the collective name for the four concentrated poverty areas in Henan Province, including Dabie Mountain...

Numerous artificial slopes emerged in the watersheds of the Chinese Loess Plateau (LP) after the Gully Land Consolidation project (GLCP) that cut slopes to create farmland in the gully, which had incurred instabilities over time and could potentially resulted in soil erosion and geological hazard. This paper explored the characteristics and prevent...

Improving the quality of economic and social development is the common goal of all countries. Since China is at the inflection point shifting from high-speed development to high-quality development (HQD), a systematic study on China's HQD evaluation system is crucial. This research elaborated the connotation of HQD in the context of China and estab...

The Global South nations and their statehoods have presented a driving force of economic and social development through most of the written history of humankind. China and India have been traditionally accounted as the economic powerhouses of the past. In recent decades, we have witnessed reestablishment of the traditional world economic structure...

Urban-rural integration (URI), as a tendency of urban-rural development worldwide, is an inevitable way to create a coordinated and sustainable human society. China has been haunted by a variety of issues related to uncoordinated urban-rural interaction in recent decades and is in the midst of a critical stage faced with great challenges and opport...

Cropland expansion often occurs on grasslands and partial forests. However, there is little quantified understanding of how cropland expansion affected the agricultural productivity and water resource consumption globally. In this study, we used spatially explicit satellite-based data, including land use maps, net primary productivity and evapotran...

With the rapid development of industrialization and urbanization, great progress has been made in China’s urban and rural socioeconomic development, but it also brings a lot of resource problems and environmental pressure, resulting in issues such as the imbalance of factor input structure and the excessive consumption of water and land resources....

This chapter analyzes the main research methods of urban–rural transformation geography. The geographical research thinking paradigm of urban–rural transformation mainly includes empiricism, positivism, behaviorism, and structuralism, and the research methods can be divided into qualitative description and quantitative analysis. The evaluation proc...

Urban–rural integration is the fundamental goal of urban–rural transformation. Revolutionizing the dualistic urban–rural system, optimizing the urban–rural development pattern, improving the social governance ability, balancing public resources allocation and coordinating the remediation of resource and environment are the main tasks of urban–rural...

In line with the new trends of economic growth, social development and population flow, principles such as people-oriented, intensive and efficient, overall consideration and regional coordination are important premises to promote the development of new-type urbanization and urban–rural integration. The key tasks of urban–rural transformation are t...

The Bohai Rim region is the “third pole” of economic growth in China’s except the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta, and is currently in the stage of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Therefore, an in-depth study of the urban–rural transformation in Bohai Rim region is of great significance to accelerate the development of Beiji...

The historical legacy of Eastern European and the Balkans’ health systems was mutually interdependent and shaped by local socioeconomic circumstances. Three distinctive systems of risk sharing and health financing developed since the late XIX century were the Bismarck, Beveridge, and Semashko systems. Modern day healthcare systems in these countrie...

Food security concerns the economy, people's livelihood and social stability of a country or region. Countries around the world always put food security on their high-priority political agenda. As the most populous developing country in the world, China produces one-fourth of the world’s food and feeds one-fifth of the population. Therefore, China’...

Land consolidation, as a sustainability-oriented policy design, has been implemented worldwide for promoting agricultural production and rural development. Although there has been a large number of publications on land consolidation, few attempts have been made to systematically assess the existing research. To fill this gap, here we present a comp...

Urban–rural transformation geography is the systemic integration, comprehensive meta-synthesis and theoretical development of urban geography and rural geography. It is one of the innovations in the discipline of geography to meet the major national strategic needs of balancing urban and rural development and promoting urban–rural integration. As a...

This chapter summarizes the research of the full text and prospects the future research frontier direction of urban–rural transformation geography. In the context of new-type urbanization and rural revitalization, the study of urban–rural transformation geography in the new era needs to establish a global concept, aim at the basic national conditio...

Regarding urban–rural relationship, scholars have deeply studied the elements, relevance and transformation of urban and rural areas from the perspectives such as urban geography, rural geography and urban–rural development. These studies have highlighted the dynamic evolutionary process of the structures and patterns of urban–rural relationship, d...

This chapter discusses the basic theories of urban–rural transformation geography, and puts forward four core concepts of urban–rural transformation to comprehensively understand the transformation of urban–rural development, i.e., “transformation tree”, “transformation law”, “transformation threshold” and “fusion body”. On this basis, the study of...

Land use change and its impacts on eco-environment attract great attentions. Earlier studies shed light on the impacts of urban build-up land and agriculture land. Yet, knowledge about the impacts of rural residential land on eco-environment, especially from different expansion patterns perspective, is relatively limited. Taking Baota District, a t...

Geography is suitable for the study of sustainability from a transdisciplinary perspective, which takes the human-land relationship as the core research. As a key obstacle to rural sustainability, poverty is an external manifestation of the coupling maladjustment of elements in human-land territorial systems. As the world's largest developing count...

Historical legacy of Eastern European and Balkans’ health systems was mutually interdependent and shaped by local socioeconomic circumstances. Three distinctive systems of risk sharing and health financing to develop since the late XIX century were the Bismarck, Beveridge, and Semashko systems. Modern day healthcare systems in these countries are c...

Cultivated land protection is an important way to ensure food security, social stability and sustainable development. As one of the main causes of cultivated land loss, the spatio-temporal pattern of illegal cultivated land use and driving forces have not been systematically investigated. This study first reviewed the evolution of China’s cultivate...

Land is the most important wealth of the poor and has the triple attributes of resource, asset and capital. However, the long-term neglect of the asset and capital attributes of land in rural China has limited the antipoverty role of land, which restricts rural sustainable development. Here, we analyze the relationship between land and rural develo...

Rural evolution is a multifaceted combination of social, economic and ecological changes. Existing research about rural evolution focused on the socioeconomic transformation but paid inadequate attention to the ecological aspects and the links to external settings. In this research, we structured the cognition of rural evolution with a social-ecolo...

The rapid advancement of urbanization and industrialization has led to the continuous strengthening of multi-functionality of land use. The overlapping, crowding, agglomeration and transformation of various land use functions suggested that there would be fierce competition and conflicts. Based on the widely recognized “ecological-production-living...

Spatial planning refers to the long-term planning and overall arrangement of land resources and space layout under the jurisdiction of a country or region government, aiming to achieve effective control and scientific management of territorial space and promote the balance between development and protection. It is generally considered as an effecti...

China's Loess Plateau (LP) is one of the most typical regions with serious soil erosion. Its ecological restoration, economic development, and social progress are directly related to realizing China's national sustainable development goals (SDGs). With intensive field investigations, comprehensive analyses of statistical data, remote sensing data,...

This book attempts to introduce the theory of system science and engineering technology into the geographic research of urban-rural transformation, reveals the level-structure-function of urban-rural transformation, and promotes the scientific research on urban-rural transformation. Focusing on the systematic diagnosis of new-type urbanization, urb...

Human geography is one of the three major branches of geography. Since the establishment of Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGSNRR, CAS) in 1940, human-economic geography has gone through several important periods, such as budding, rise, maturity, fluctuation and prosperity. Outstanding...

The urban-rural transformation from dichotomy to integration is a gradual process. Like rural areas in many countries, Chinese rural society is experiencing a decline in all spheres due to depopulation, aging, lack of economic opportunity, and so on. Aiming at solving the serious rural issues, China proposed the implementation of a rural revitaliza...

The cumulative anomaly analysis, the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), the Bernaola Galvan heuristic segmentation algorithm (BGSA), the Le Page test, the moving t test at different sub-series scales, and the quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) were used to demonstrate the statistical characteristics of the temperature changes in the stud...

The symbiosis of housing and industry is currently regarded to be the key to implement the national strategy of rural revitalization in China. However, challenges have emerged in portraying the spatial mismatch pattern of housing and industry development in rural regions from the demographic perspectives accompanying the massive rural-urban migrati...

Rural spaces are multifunctional, often containing production, living and ecological functions. Optimizing the production-living-ecological space has become one of the cores of China’s ecological civilization and sustainable development strategy. Research of the coupling coordination relationships among rural production, living and ecological funct...

Climate warming and its corresponding impacts on agriculture system increasingly attach great attentions. Earlier studies more concerned the impacts of the cultivated area expansion under climate change. Yet limited knowledge is about the impacts of climate warming on the cropping index change with the shifts of cropping system border. In this stud...

Extensive studies have been carried out on the impact of human activities on air pollution, but systematic investigation on the relationship between air pollutant and meteorological conditions is still insufficient, especially in the context of China’s site scale and recent comprehensive environmental pollution control. Here, we used a spatial inte...

Chinese agricultural output has been multiple under the intensive input of production factors since the reform and opening-up. Such a growth pattern that realizes high output through high input results in increasingly prominent environmental pollution problems. Considering the provincial panel data in China during 1978–2017 as the research units an...

Urbanization-induced land use problems have been haunting China’s urban agglomerations ever since the beginning of this period of unparalleled economic progress. The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) region is no exception, where coordinated development planning has been implemented by the central government to further resolve attributed problems. Land u...

Population outflow, one of the essential causes of rural decline, increasingly weakens and hollows rural main bodies, which is particularly detrimental for poor areas. Although a plethora of scholars have focused on the characteristics and driving mechanisms of this form of migration in macro-scale research, few studies have closely addressed the o...

With the increase in climate change and increasing social concerns about environmental deterioration, sustainability has become a hot topic in both natural and social research. Nowadays, sustainable cities are one of the focal points, while rural areas have been disregarded. In fact, rural areas have been suffering from environmental degradation fo...

This paper tries to analyze the determinants and driving mechanisms of both settlement intention and hukou transfer intention for rural migrants in Chinese cities, which can help to understand the gap between de facto and de jure urbanization in China. Based on China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) in 2014, 1145 samples with their settlement int...

Poverty alleviation resettlement (PAR) is a national rural development policy which uses resettlement as a tool for addressing environmental and poverty-related concerns in a rapidly changing world in China. It is regarded as one of the effective ways for the poor shaking off poverty in the implementation process of targeted poverty alleviation (TP...

Background: Understanding the health status of the poor households and the influence of unhealthy on their income can provide some vital insights into the effectiveness and appropriateness of poverty reduction solutions. Methods: Based on a nationwide cross-sectional survey of 29,712 rural poor households, this study systematically investigated...

Equal access to education has long been a global concern and is important for rural revitalization strategy in the new era. However, little is known about the regional differences of educational resources in China, especially southwest China, where the spatial heterogeneity of human and physical geography is extremely significant. Using a dataset o...

Sustainable agriculture and rural development (SARD) plays a crucial role in maintaining natural resources, protecting the ecological environment, enhancing global food security, eradicating poverty, and even promoting rural revitalization. To understand the degree of implementation of SARD in the Shenfu coalfield under climate change, three villag...

The urbanization process can have a profound impact on economic development, human society, natural resources, and the environment, and is closely related to sustainable development. As a developing country, China has experienced rapid urbanization that has brought forth not only economic development and income growth but also environmental degrada...

The sandy area along the Great Wall in northern Shaanxi Province of China, is located in the transition zone between the Maowusu Desert and the loess hills and gullies region, with a vast territory and large per capita of cultivated agricultural land. However, the cultivated land quality is generally poor due to the local natural conditions. It is...

Regional environmental degradation and impoverishment interact and restrict each other. While acknowledging this relationship, little is known about the extent of their impact. By integrating multi-source data, this study used econometric models and spatial analysis techniques to explore the geographical distribution pattern of rural poverty in Chi...

Land system reform (LSR) helps to protect farmers' rights and interests and national food security. China is a country dominated by agriculture but insufficient arable land resources. The contradiction between man and land is prominent. To alleviate the man-land contradiction, the Chinese government has carried out a series of LSRs, especially in t...