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Integrated Governance of Land for Eco-Urbanization
... City projects that do not consider the preservation of ecological capital for future generations may benefit from the advice by specialists in ecology (Hull, 2008). Next generation sustainability-driven ideas for the making of cities need to take into account resource conservation and eco-urbanisation (Wang, Deng & Wong, 2016). Projects impacting the ecology and settlements would consider an effective allocation of resources (Agrawal, 2001) to achieve long-term sustainability goals. ...
The purpose of the book on integrated urban planning (IUP) is to present ongoing research from the universities involved in the project Creating the Network of Knowledge Labs for Sustainable and Resilient Environments (KLABS). Although sustainability and resilience have been largely explored in many complex social-ecological systems, they have only recently been applied in the context of cities. Both concepts are useful when seeking an integrated approach to urban planning as they help to look at the city as an interconnected, multi-dimensional system. Analysing the sustainability and the resilience of urban systems involves looking at environmental, social and economic aspects, as well as at those related to technology, culture and institutional structures. Sustainability, resilience as well as integrated urban development are all focused on process. Their objectives are typically defined around the ongoing operation of the process and they can change during the time. Therefore, building a sustainable and resilient city is a collective endeavor that is about mindsets just as much as about physical structures and their operation, where capacity to anticipate and plan for the future, to learn and to adapt are paramount. The papers published in this book show that the recent and current research in those institutions focuses on the directions of development of IUP, the processes that support sustainable and resilient use of natural resources and their application in the Western Balkan and some other European countries. Each essay aims to provide an overview of key aspects of the research topic. The division of the book into three parts - directions, resources and territories - underlines how the challenges that the contemporary city poses can be dealt with more effectively by integrating different paradigms, concepts and trends of urban development and governance; taking into account the numerous problems linked to the availability and exploitation of the main natural and non-natural resources; and looking at the city and the territory as systems in constant transformation, not reducible within rigid dichotomies such as urban/rural, dense/sprawled, formal/informal, etc.
This systematic review examines the intersection of systems thinking and learning theory in addressing rural–urban challenges in light of increasing global urbanization. We explore how different dimensions of systems thinking—ontological (how we understand systems) and epistemological (how we think about systems)—align with single-, double-, and triple-loop learning in rural–urban research from 2014 to 2024. Through a rigorous screening process of the peer-reviewed literature, we analyze how theoretical frameworks manifest in research approaches, methodological choices, and learning outcomes. Our findings reveal promising developments and persistent gaps in current approaches, and suggest pathways for more integrated theoretical and methodological frameworks. We also highlight the need for studies that develop knowledge and practices that support collective learning and joint trajectories towards sustainability from a cross-sectorial perspective in rural–urban geographies. This synthesis contributes to discussions on how to effectively address complex challenges at the rural–urban interface while advancing both theoretical understanding and practical application.
Global environmental changes are multifactorial and affected by multiple forms of land use. For this reason, and also in view of the current world climate scenario, they have become highly relevant and are subject to analysis and discussions on the best uses of land. The research presented here offers a systematic analysis on the priorities related to the multiple uses of land and their implications in urban planning. An exploratory and descriptive analysis is used with a qualitative approach based in a systematic literature review. General findings indicate that land uses arise amid the duality between economy and environmental concerns, while increasing frequencies of heat islands, desertification, suppression of green areas in cities, and other phenomena are the backdrop. Urban planning tied to social and environmental dynamics becomes a powerful engine to predict rational uses of the land, enabling and balancing the economic–environmental dynamics without overriding each other. Proper planning of urban land governs both the infrastructure itself and the human influence over space in addition to predicting future uses and disuse as well as actions not consistent with sustainable development.
Sponge city is a new urban stormwater management strategy proposed in China, which enables the city to absorb and save stormwater like a sponge, then release stormwater to solve the problems of urban waterlogging and water shortage. However, at present, sponge cities are confronted with such problems as high management cost and low management efficiency, a lack of research on collaborative management between cities and the feasibility of regional cooperation between sponge cities needs to be proved. Therefore, this article puts forward the theory of sponge city regional ecological cooperative management and builds a multivariate cluster analysis model of sponge city and conducts an empirical study on data of 71 Chinese cities. The research results show that under the multi-index linkage system, China’s urban climate and ecological characteristics do have the characteristics of regional agglomeration and the basic conditions of interregional ecological cooperation, which proves the feasibility of the hypothesis of regional cooperation. Therefore, strengthening the ecological cooperation of sponge cities among regional cities is conducive to improving the supply efficiency of ecological environment quality and realizing the sustainable development of cities.
The purpose of this article is to analyze the effects of multifunctional rural land use (MRLU) on residents’ wellbeing. A questionnaire survey on 805 rural residents in 64 villages of the Xinzhou District of Wuhan city in China, and estimators of OLS, ordered logit, and ordered probit were employed. The Shannon’s H index and Simpson’s Reciprocal Index are used to measure MRLU and the life satisfaction approach is used to measure wellbeing. An inverted-U pattern is observed in the relationship between MRLU and wellbeing, and another finding of the study is the threshold of MRLU. The article contributes to the literature by integrating MRLU into wellbeing analysis from a spatial-separated form, and deepens the relationship between MRLU and the residents’ wellbeing. MRLU is characterized by differences and a moderation, which can provide a reference for profiling rural land use planning and for designing land-use policy, and for prompting rural sustainable development.
There has been growing interest in the past twenty years or so in the potential contribution of new forms of governance to solving co-ordination problems in and across a wide range of specialised social systems (such as the economy, the legal system, the political system, and the health system) and in the life world (or, broadly understood, civil society). This interest is reflected in growing ambiguities about the meaning of governance. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I adopt a relatively narrow definition of governance. Thus governance is defined as the reflexive self-organisation of independent actors involved in complex relations of reciprocal interdependence, with such self-organisation being based on continuing dialogue and resource-sharing to develop mutually beneficial joint projects and to manage the contradictions and dilemmas inevitably involved in such situations. Governance organised on this basis need not entail complete symmetry in power relations or complete equality in the distribution of benefits: indeed, it is highly unlikely to do so, almost regardless of the object of governance or the ‘stakeholders’ who actually participate in the governance process. All that is involved in this preliminary definition is the commitment on the part of those involved to reflexive self-organisation in the face of complex reciprocal interdependence.
Based on the computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling method, this research analyzes the relationship between industrial structure and land use structure in China. The results show that our model is feasible, and the simulation results are of a certain stability. Under the scenario analysis and projection of the relationship between the industrial structure and land use structure of the thirty-one provinces in China from 2010 to 2020, the proportions of secondary and tertiary industry in each province have been increasing; correspondingly, the proportion of agriculture has been decreasing. This means that the industrial structure of China is changing. As for land use, in general, the trend is similar to the industrial structure changes. The transformation of the structure of industrial development and land use has driven economic structure changes in China. The economic structure has an inclination to transform from agriculture to both secondary and tertiary industry. Along with industrial transformation, the cultivated land in China shows a trend of continuous decline. Empirical analysis results indicate that a decrease of cultivated land is acceptable under the scenario of economic growth in the next ten years. This shows a possibility that the economic efficiency of land use for cultivation and business services will decline, and more attention ought to be paid to increasing the economic efficiency of land use.
Complex land use/cover patterns in urban areas significantly influence their prevailing surface temperature conditions. As a result of differential cooling and heating of various land use/cover, large temperature ranges are associated with bare land, built-up land, etc. and low ranges are found in vegetation cover and water bodies. Extremely high and low temperature conditions in built-up land have direct and negative impacts on health conditions, and therefore are imperative to study. Thus, an attempt has been made in this research to analyze seasonal variations in surface temperature in city of Delhi. Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) 5 satellite images for the four seasons, viz., 16 January (winter), 5 March (spring), 8 May (summer) and 29 September (autumn) 2011 have been used to interpret the distribution and changes in surface temperature. A total of 80 samples from all land use/cover categories were taken to generalize the patterns along with north-south and west-east profiles. The extracted surface temperature patterns reflect the spatial and temporal dynamics of temperature over different land use/cover. The north-south and west-east gradient of temperature demonstrates that the core of Delhi has a much lower temperature and weak urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon.
Many oil, mineral, and plantation crop–based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity
boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s. This article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources
(those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base, such as oil and minerals) and plantation crops are predisposed
to heightened economic and social divisions and weakened institutional capacity. This in turn impedes their ability to respond
effectively to shocks, which previous studies have shown to be essential for sustaining rising levels of prosperity. Analysis
of data on classifications of export structure, controlling for a wide array of other potential determinants of governance,
shows that point source– and coffee and cocoa–exporting countries do relatively poorly across an array of governance indicators.
These governance effects are not associated simply with being a natural resource exporter. Countries with natural resource
exports that are diffuse—relying primarily on livestock and agricultural produce from small family farms—do not show the same
strong effects—and have had more robust growth recoveries.
This paper attempts to propose hybrid methodology of compiling water resource extended input-output (IO) table at county level (According to administrative structure of China, a county is subordinate to its province, and provincial level is parallel to state level of other countries). By combining Non-Survey-based RAS-technique for possible iterated results and Partial-Survey-based current situation for actual ongoing resource-consumption, we aimed to depict a more accurate structure for water resource consumption and regional economic impact analysis at a county level in the arid area. Additionally, non-parameter methodology was adopted to interpolate missing data. Since human interventions continually have impacted on the natural environment that would finally lead to over-consumption of natural resources, we introduced water consumption caused by cultivation in the Primary Industry and water usage in other industries into a local input-output matrix of Shandan County in Gansu Province, China. Evidence of empirical analysis shows that the modified IO table can more accurately describe economic structure than weighted provincial average IO table does. Moreover, industrialization is ongoing with economic diversity and continually generating water use demand even though also stimulating imports of light industrial products according to the Partial-Survey reports. It demonstrates that industrialization and increasing household consumption drive a high speed of economic growth but with a high cost of water consumption through the Secondary and Tertiary Industries, even at a far rural area. Hence, water scarcity would be a constraint on sustainable development in regions such as Shandan County when taking economic valuation of natural water consumption into account.
The Yan’an project has created flat ground by levelling hills and filling valleys, and was carefully planned by the local government nlafter thorough feasibility testing by geoengineers, hydrologists, water conservationists and ecologists. The site was consequently able to withstand severe erosion caused by a once-in-a-century flood in July 2013. Any threat of collapse of soft-soil deposits has been eliminated by repeatedly compacting the relocated soil in layers. This reinforcement strategy has increased soil-particle density from 1.9 to 2.1 grams per cubic centimetre (see go.nature.com/mqg194; in Chinese).
The recent 70% decline in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon suggests that it is possible to manage the advance of a vast agricultural frontier. Enforcement of laws, interventions in soy and beef supply chains, restrictions on access to credit, and expansion of protected areas appear to have contributed to this decline, as did a decline in the demand for new deforestation. The supply chain interventions that fed into this deceleration are precariously dependent on corporate risk management, and public policies have relied excessively on punitive measures. Systems for delivering positive incentives for farmers to forgo deforestation have been designed but not fully implemented. Territorial approaches to deforestation have been effective and could consolidate progress in slowing deforestation while providing a framework for addressing other important dimensions of sustainable development.
Although many contemporary studies of agriculture associate larger properties with higher relative productivity, this assumption has limited relevancy for the analysis of situations in which property owners profit more from large-scale property accumulation itself rather than any superiority in exploitation opportunities offered by increased size. In Brazil, the efficiency-of-scale paradigm has been used to criticize peasant agriculture as unproductive and hide contradictions deriving from land concentration. As this paper argues, however, small-scale agriculture is actually responsible for most of Brazil's food production, rural employment and agricultural income. The paper utilizes a land governance perspective to analyze the implementation of structural reforms aimed at turning back the land monopolization tide as well as efforts to weaken long-standing legal principles that socially condition individual property “rights” in Brazil.
Within an open system of cities, compensating differentials theory predicts that local real estate prices will be higher in cities with higher quality non-market local public goods. In this case, more polluted cities will feature lower home prices. A city’s air pollution levels depend on economic activity within the city and on cross-border pollution externalities. In this paper, we demonstrate that air pollution in Chinese cities is degraded by cross-boundary externalities. We use this exogenous source of variation in a city’s air pollution to present new robust estimates of the real estate impact of local air pollution. We find that reductions in cross-boundary pollution flows have significant effects on local home prices. On average, a 10 % decrease in imported neighbor pollution is associated with a 0.76 % increase in local home prices. We also find that the marginal valuation of clean air is larger in richer Chinese cities, and hukou barrier of labor migration has been further phased out.
China’s extremely high levels of urban air, water and greenhouse gas emissions levels pose local and global environmental challenges. China’s urban leaders have substantial influence and discretion over the evolution of economic activity that generates such externalities. This paper examines the political economy of urban leaders’ incentives to tackle pollution issues. Based on a principal-agent framework, we present evidence consistent with the hypothesis that both the central government and the public are placing pressure on China’s urban leaders to mitigate externalities. Such “pro-green” incentives suggest that many of China’s cities could enjoy significant environmental progress in the near future.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Making existing cities and new urban development more ecologically based and liveable is an urgent priority in the global push for sustainability. This paper discusses ten critical responses to this issue and summarizes them in a simple conceptual model that places the nexus between transport and urban form at the heart of developing an eco-city. This involves compact, mixed-use urban form, well-defined higher-density, human-oriented centres, priority to the development of superior public transport systems and conditions for non-motorized modes, with minimal road capacity increases, and protection of the city's natural areas and food-producing capacity. These factors form the framework in which everything else is embedded and must operate, and if they are not addressed only marginal changes in urban sustainability can be made. Within this framework, environmental technologies need to be extensively applied. Economic growth needs to emphasize creativity and innovation and to strengthen the environmental, social and cultural amenities of the city. The public realm throughout the city needs to be of a high quality, and sustainable urban design principles need to be applied in all urban development. All these dimensions need to operate within two key processes involving vision-oriented and reformist thinking and a strong, community-oriented, democratic sustainability framework for decision-making.
We employ a province-level data set to assess the contribution of fiscal decentralization initiated in the 1980s to economic growth in China. Controlling for other concurrent reform measures, we find that fiscal decentralization has raised the growth rate of per capita GDP at the province level. This is consistent with the hypothesis that fiscal decentralization increases economic efficiency. In addition, we also find that the rural reform, non-state sector development, and capital accumulation are the key driving forces of the impressive growth in China over the past twenty or so years.
In the rapidly growing literature on urban development in China, many authors have emphasised the salient features of economic decentralisation and the increasingly significant role of the local state. However, such arguments neglect a counter-trend in which the central state has deterritorialised and rehierarchised some key functions. Using the case of land governance, this paper argues that facing the complication of changing urban conditions, there is a resurgence of the state's regulatory power. The decentralisation of economic governance is now counter-balanced by the rise of state strategies to control the articulation of scales through which a more centrally consolidated power can be achieved. The central government still serves as an important level of economic regulation. In this sense, new interpretations of commoditised urban transformation, especially commoditised production of the built environment, should be understood by underscoring the interplay between trends of decentralisation and territorialisation and counter-trends of recentralisation and hierarchisation.
In recent years, there have been several dozen major ‘eco-city’ initiatives underway worldwide, primarily in response to global climate change and growing urbanization. Among these, two have been in the making since the early 2000s in California, USA, from where the eco-city movement originated over 20 years ago: Treasure Island, in San Francisco, and Sonoma Mountain Village, in Rohnert Park (Sonoma County). This article analyses these urban sustainability initiatives in terms of the emerging hybrid governance relations and interactions and how these inform the planning, co-ordination and implementation of the initiatives. Among the key governance aspects discussed are the partial privatization through elaborate public–private arrangements, the role of international partners in shaping the urban sustainability agenda and the project-based approach used to effect the initiatives. The findings suggest a prevailing mode of ‘governance at a distance’ and related innovation in governance mechanisms, which, in turn, impacts on how urban sustainability is conceptualized and put into practice.
Sense-of-place research has grown in recent years and has attracted interest from a diverse range of disciplines. Beckley (20031.
Beckley , T. M. 2003 . The relative importance of sociocultural and ecological factors in attachment to place . In Understanding community-forest relations , ed. L. Kruger , 105 – 126 . USDA Forest Service General Technical Report PNW-GTR-566 . Portland , OR : Pacific Northwest Research Station . View all references) suggests that it may be possible to disaggregate persons' attachment to biophysical versus sociocultural aspects of sense of place. Stedman (200320.
Stedman , R. C. 2003 . Is it really just a social construction?: The contribution of the physical environment to sense of place . Society Nat. Resources 16 : 671 – 685 . [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®]View all references) and Beckley (20031.
Beckley , T. M. 2003 . The relative importance of sociocultural and ecological factors in attachment to place . In Understanding community-forest relations , ed. L. Kruger , 105 – 126 . USDA Forest Service General Technical Report PNW-GTR-566 . Portland , OR : Pacific Northwest Research Station . View all references) challenge researchers to experiment with new methods for examining the subject. This research addresses the challenges through the use of resident-employed photography. The method was used to elicit sense-of-place values in four communities across Canada. Participants took photographs of things that most attached them to their communities or region. Participants were interviewed about their photographs, and 937 photo-narrative data points were created and analyzed. The analysis involved ascribing photo-narratives to single response categories. Residents distributed their photographs fairly evenly between sociocultural and biophysical dimensions of their communities; however, many attachments involve both sociocultural and biophysical influences.
This paper aims to demonstrate the relationship between economic growth and the urban core area in order to help urban planners reach a better understanding of the pressures that are leading to changes in land use. Using a unique panel dataset with measures of China's land use, it is shown that, during the late 1980s and 1990s, China's urban land area rose significantly. Descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis are then used to identify the determinants of urban land use change. In addition to using more standard regression approaches such as ordinary least squares, the analysis is augmented with spatial statistical analysis. The analysis demonstrates the overwhelming importance of economic growth in the determination of urban land use. Overall, it is found that urban land expands by 3 per cent when the economy, measured by gross domestic product, grows by 10 per cent. It is also shown that the expansion of the urban core is associated with changes in China's economic structure. If urban planners have access to forecasts of economic growth, using these results they should be able to have a better basis for planning the expansion of the built-up area in the urban core
This paper summarizes the theoretical insights drawn from a study of thirteen large–scale urban development projects (UDPs) in twelve European Union countries. The project focused on the way in which globalization and liberalization articulate with the emergence of new forms of governance, on the formation of a new scalar gestalt of governing and on the relationship between large–scale urban development and political, social and economic power relations in the city. Among the most important conclusions, we found that:
•Large–scale UDPs have increasingly been used as a vehicle to establish exceptionality measures in planning and policy procedures. This is part of a neoliberal “New Urban Policy” approach and its selective “middle — and upper–class” democracy. It is associated with new forms of “governing” urban interventions, characterized by less democratic and more elite–driven priorities.
•Local democratic participation mechanisms are not respected or are applied in a very “formalist” way, resulting in a new choreography of elite power. However, grassroots movements occasionally manage to turn the course of events in favor of local participation and of modest social returns for deprived social groups.
•The UDPs are poorly integrated at best into the wider urban process and planning system. As a consequence, their impact on a city as a whole and on the areas where the projects are located remains ambiguous.
•Most UDPs accentuate socioeconomic polarization through the working of real–estate markets (price rises and displacement of social or low–income housing), changes in the priorities of public budgets that are increasingly redirected from social objectives to investments in the built environment and the restructuring of the labor market.
•The UDPs reflect and embody a series of processes that are associated with changing spatial scales of governance; these changes, in turn, reflect a shifting geometry of power in the governing of urbanization.
This chapter reflects on the time-space complexity of governance practices in the current era of post-national statehood.
This is illustrated through two contrasting examples: the first is the growing emphasis on the “territorialization of social
work”, where rootedness in place is increasingly emphasized (but generates a “territorial trap”); the second is the growing
emphasis on the “Europeanization of employment policy”, where the role of the open method of coordination (OMC) is claimed
to be an effective response to the clear tensions between national policies and the European-wide perspective (but maintains
a “governance gap”). These cases show the high complexity of current governance practices and the high likelihood of governance
failure. This brings the author to advocate the “multi-scalar meta-governance” perspective, in which the “governance of governance”
as well as the “multi-faceted spatiality of governance” are at stake. However, this should not be misunderstood as another
plea for “rational management” at a higher level. Instead, the author poses the principles of reflexivity, flexibility and
irony as the basic premises of such an approach.
Economic evolution is considered as being driven by innovation of research and development (R&D) even if regional characteristics usually have critical impacts on various culture-oriented living styles that change in a social transformation dynamically. In documented Chinese history, climate changes and geographic conditions are constraints of the economic evolution in ecologically fragile regions. Lots of unpublished indigenous knowledge of environmental adaptation as a part of culture have been excluded from innovative records. In this research, we review research records of several key factors closely associated with economic evolution in the history of study regions, including climate change, cultural transition, economic base, resource endowment, and transportation accessibility. By surveying previous research records and contents, we examine the paths of economic evolution mixed with adaptive cultures response to climate change in each region, and draw conclusions that (1) the economic evolution with regional climate changes interactively experience three stages of culture-hindered, culture-mixed, and culture-impelled adaptation diversely; (2) regions that have higher economic performance with less innovative records highly likely have a relatively large number of indigenous knowledge unpublished throughout cultural evolution; and (3) English world has research preference to the regions where have lower economic performance with a distinctive culture in China.
This study reveals that ecological intercorrelation in urban-rural area is a key role in changes of unobserved environmental effects of urban pollution, energy use inefficiency, and cultivated land loss. In a deductive model, we find that inequivalent economic growth in urban-rural area results in the variability of eco-efficiency of industrial production in urban area, which increases the risks of environmental effect in adjacent suburban and rural area, and directly affects changes of unobserved environmental effect spatial-temporally. Through ecological intercorrelation, both observed and unobserved environmental effects in this dynamic mechanism are formed, consequently intensify the regional inequality of environmental pollution, and frustrate the future coordinative development of regional economy. By employing the data of case study area of Gaoyou in China, estimations show that observed eco-efficiency is getting better but unobserved eco-efficiency is getting worse until this place becomes an eco-city. This study has proved that ecological intercorrelation in some extent sustains unobserved environmental effects to affect regional environmental degradation.
Western China has played a critical supporting role for economic development in China over previous decades, by providing cheap labor and abundant natural resources, but it is time to reap some returns. Research shows a strong correlation between urbanization and economic growth and between urbanization level and per-capita income. Therefore, urbanization and associated changes can become a powerful driving force for socioeconomic development, and can provide an opportunity for poverty alleviation and human development. Also, it has the potential to relieve eco-environment pressures of population in Western China. For sustainable urbanization in Western China, there is still a long way to go, and there are both challenges and opportunities. Related to but rapidly increasing urbanization, Western China has the following characteristics: an overall low but rapidly increasing urbanization level, with a strong spatial variety; few urbanized areas, with small size and low density; a relatively weak growth engine function of cities; and few cities have fully fledged urban function and enough attraction to retain high-end human capital. However, Western China also has unique opportunities in terms of promoting urbanization. First, the central government's determination to have the region develop can be the "wind under the wings" for the region. Second, the relatively low current level of urbanization means there is little "minus" or historical legacy and the associated necessity to retrofit, which can be costly. Third, as urban air and water pollution in eastern cities is drawing increasing concern, relatively clean air and water in some secondary cities in the western region can be attractive to the well-educated "human capital." Sustainable urbanization in Western China is a highly complex issue that requires sophisticated management approaches. Despite significant investments and changes already undertaken, severe impacts on the natural environment are already being experienced and some environmental services are at or near a point of severe ecological and health-related disruption. Nonetheless, there are also significant opportunities in this region of enormous natural resource wealth and cultural diversity. What is required is a well-articulated, integrated, consistent and strategic framework and approach involving all levels of government.
We develop an overlapping generations model with environmental quality and endogenous environmental culture. Based upon empirical evidence, preferences over culturally-weighted consumption and envi- ronmental quality are assumed to follow a Leontie function. We fi nd that four diff erent regimes may be possible, with interior or corner solutions in investments in environmental culture and maintenance. Depending on the parameter conditions, there exists one of two possible, asymptotically stable steady states, one with and one without investments in environmental culture. For low wealth levels, society is unable to free resources for environmental culture. In this case, society will only invest in environmental maintenance if environmental quality is suffi ciently low. Once society has reached a certain level of economic development, then it may optimally invest a part of its wealth in developing an environmental culture. Environmental culture has not only a positive impact on environmental quality through lower levels of consumption, but it improves the environment through maintenance expenditure for wealth-environment combinations at which, in a restricted model without environmental culture, no maintenance would be undertaken. Environmental culture leads to a society with a higher indirect utility at steady state in comparison to the restricted model. Our model leads us to the conclusion that, by raising the importance of environmental quality for utility, environmental culture leads to lower steady state levels of consumption and wealth, but higher environmental quality. Thus, for societies trapped in a situation with low environmental quality, investments in culture may induce positive feedback loops, where more culture raises environmental quality which in turn raises environmental culture. We also discuss how en- vironmental culture may lead to an Environmental Kuznets Curve.
Ecological resettlement (shengtai yimin in Chinese) has been initiated by the Chinese government on a large scale and aims to help degraded landscapes to recover and to improve the living standards of local people in western China. Since 2003, the government has invested RMB
7.5 billion (Chinese yuan, over U.S.$1 billion) in Qinghai Province to establish the world's second-largest nature reserve around the headwaters of the Yangtze, the Yellow and the Mekong rivers (Sanjiangyuan). The resettlement of Tibetan herders from the Sanjiangyuan grasslands
to urban areas is one of the project activities. Resettlement and the grazing ban policy are understood to have profound implications for those being resettled, as well as for their home and host areas. In particular, its rationale and consequences need rethinking, from both an ecological
and socio-economic perspective. This article draws on field research and a case study in Madoi County to argue the logic for resettlement, to examine its socio-economic consequences and environmental effects, and to explore possible solutions.
Urban–rural integration has become the macro policy in China to narrow the gap between urban and rural development. Meanwhile, the rapid pace of economic growth and urbanisation has increasingly posed challenges to urban areas over land availability and provision of infrastructure and labour. Policymakers have started to search for a more sustainable development mode to improve urban competitiveness. Against this context, urban master planning has started to adopt urban–rural integration as a core principle and extend its spatial coverage to rural areas. Through the case of Nanjing, this article investigates the practice and delivery of the 2008 planning reforms that enhanced city-regions as a spatial context for planning and assesses whether the new integrative plan achieves the objective of sustainable urban development.
The temperature of cities continues to increase because of the heat island phenomenon and the undeniable climatic change. The observed high ambient temperatures intensify the energy problem of cities, deteriorates comfort conditions, put in danger the vulnerable population and amplify the pollution problems. To counterbalance the phenomenon, important mitigation technologies have been developed and proposed. Among them, technologies aiming to increase the albedo of cities and the use of vegetative green roofs appear to be very promising, presenting a relatively high heat island mitigation potential. This paper aims to present the state of the art on both the above technologies, when applied in the city scale. Tenths of published studies have been analysed. Most of the available data are based on simulation studies using mesoscale modeling techniques while important data are available from the existing experimental studies. When a global increase of the city's albedo is considered, the expected mean decrease of the average ambient temperature is close to 0.3 K per 0.1 rise of the albedo, while the corresponding average decrease of the peak ambient temperature is close to 0.9 K. When only cool roofs are considered, the analysis of the existing data shows that the expected depression rate of the average urban ambient temperature varies between 0.1 and 0.33 K per 0.1 increase of the roofs albedo with a mean value close to 0.2 K. As it concerns green roofs, existing simulation studies show that when applied on a city scale, they may reduce the average ambient temperature between 0.3 and 3 K. Detailed analysis of many studies reporting a comparison of the mitigation potential of both technologies has permitted the definition of the limits, the boundaries and the conditions under which the considered technologies reach their better performance, in a synthetic way.
The metaphor of ecosystem service may blind us to the complexity of the natural systems which underpin and produce services. We, reviewed key references and propose a framework to illustrate the social system relying on the ecological system and the relationships between ecosystem composition, ecosystem structure, ecosystem processes and ecosystem services, in order to reduce this complexity. We argue that plans to manage ecosystem services will not be successful without a deep understanding of their link with the ecosystem processes that support them. By linking ecosystem processes and ecosystem services, we explore the possible determinants of the biodiversity components on the quantity, quality and reliability of ecosystem services at all levels, and its usefulness in making targeted decisions. Disentangling the complex interrelationships among multiple ecosystem services from the driven processes is helpful in lowering the risk of unwanted trade-offs, and taking advantage of synergies. In landscape management, it is advisable to design suitable ecosystem structures for maximizing ecosystem services based on knowledge of the natural ecosystem processes.
The resilience, defined here as the speed with which a system returns to equilibrium state following a perturbation, is investigated for both food web energy models and nutrient cycling models. Previous simulation studies of food web energy models have shown that resilience increases as the flux of energy through the food web per unit amount of energy in the steady state web increases. Studies of nutrient cycling models have shown that resilience increases as the mean number of cycles that nutrient (or other mineral) atoms make before leaving the system decreases. In the present study these conclusions are verified analytically for general ecosystem models. The behavior of resilience in food web energy models and nutrient cycling models is a reflection of the time that a given unit, whether of energy or matter, spends in the steady state system. The shorter this residence time is, the more resilient the system is.
This article reviews recent research on contemporary transformations of global land governance. It shows how changes in global governance have facilitated and responded to radical revalorizations of land, together driving the intensified competition and struggles over land observed in many other contributions to this special issue. The rules in place to govern land use are shifting from "territorial" towards "flow-centered" arrangements, the latter referring to governance that targets particular flows of resources or goods, such as certification of agricultural or wood products. The intensifying competition over land coupled 2 with shifts towards flow-centered governance has generated land uses involving new forms of social exclusion, inequity and ecological simplification.
This research introduces family composition into the sustainable livelihoods framework for policy analysis. We apply this approach to a case study on the Grain for Green Program in western China. Using recent survey data from Zhouzhi County, we show that the impact of the policy on rural livelihoods varies across household compositions. The environmental program neither targets asset-poor households, nor does it necessarily shift the on-farm labor to non-farm sectors, which would improve household incomes (after controlling for the effect of assets). Households with children but without the elderly tend to have lower migration rates and lower incomes after participation in the program. Policy strategies should consider household heterogeneity, particularly household composition in rural China.
We raise four challenges to the claim of ecological modernization theory (EMT) that continued modernization is necessary for ecological sustainability. First, EMT needs to go beyond merely demonstrating that societies modify their institutions in reaction to environmental problems and show that such modifications lead to ecological improvements. Second, EMT must show that late stages of modernizing processes lead to the ecological transformation of production and consumption at relatively high frequency. Third, EMT must demonstrate that industries or firms that are reducing their direct impact on the environment are not contributing to the expansion of negative impacts by other industries or firms. Fourth, EMT must show not only that economies are becoming more resource efficient but also that the pace of increase in efficiency exceeds the pace of increase in overall production. In this article, we review the existing evidence and find that EMT has insufficiently addressed these four issues.
With a pace of about twice the observed rate of global warming, the temperature on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (Earth's "third pole") has increased by 0.2 °C per decade over the past 50 years, which results in significant permafrost thawing and glacier retreat. Our review suggested that warming enhanced net primary production (NPP) and soil respiration, decreased methane (CH4 ) emissions from wetlands and increased CH4 consumption of meadows, but might increase CH4 emissions from lakes. Warming induced permafrost thawing and glaciers melting would also result in substantial emission of old carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and CH4 . Nitrous oxide (N2 O) emission was not stimulated by warming itself, but might be slightly enhanced by wetting. However, there are many uncertainties in such biogeochemical cycles under climate change. Human activities (e.g., grazing, land cover changes) further modified the biogeochemical cycles and amplified such uncertainties on the plateau. If the projected warming and wetting continues, the future biogeochemical cycles will be more complicated. So facing research in this field is an ongoing challenge of integrating field observations with process-based ecosystem models to predict the impacts of future climate change and human activities at various temporal and spatial scales. To reduce the uncertainties and improve the precision of the predictions of the impacts of climate change and human activities on biogeochemical cycles, efforts should focus on conducting more field observation studies, integrating data within improved models, and developing new knowledge about coupling among carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus biogeochemical cycles as well as about the role of microbes in these cycles. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
China's rapid urbanization, characterized by large-scale rural–urban migration and radial expansion of urban built-up areas, produces a new type of urban neighbourhood, namely the “urban village” (chengzhongcun). This paper considers the urban village as a community of interest for urbanized villagers, a migrant settlement with low-rent housing, and an urban self-organized grassroots unit, respectively related to the ambiguous property rights, an informal rental market, and the vacuum of state regulation. The urban village is therefore viewed as an unregulated asset despite its unruliness and disorder. Meanwhile, the formation and dynamics of the urban village are understood from the perspectives of land use transformation and property rights redistribution, with an additional emphasis on the succession of traditional social norms and networks. In this sense, the urban village can be seen as a transitional neighbourhood, characterized by unstable land rights and a mixture of rural and urban society. Drawing from the empirical data of 11 urban villages from six large Chinese cities, this paper presents the general characteristics of urban villages. This study points out that the vacuum of state regulation in the urban village makes possible a means of subsistence for landless villagers and provides low-cost residential space for migrants. The transformation of the urban village under state regulation would produce complicated results.
Global climate change is frequently considered a major conservation threat. The Earth's climate has already warmed by 0.5 degrees C over the past century, and recent studies show that it is possible to detect the effects of a changing climate on ecological systems. This suggests that global change may be a current and future conservation threat. Changes in recent decades are apparent at all levels of ecological organizations: population and life-history changes, shifts in geographic range, changes in species composition of communities, and changes in the structure and functioning of ecosystems. These ecological effects can be linked to recent population declines adn to both local and global extinctions of species. Although it is impossible to prove that climate change is the cause of these ecological effects, these findings have important implications for conservation biology. It is no longer safe to assume that all of a species' historic range remains suitable. In drawing attention to the importance of climate change as a current threat to species, these studies emphasize the need for current conservation efforts to consider climate change in both in situ conservation and reintroduction efforts. Additional threats will emerge as climate continues to change, especially as climate interacts with other stressors such as habitat fragmentation. These studies can contribute to preparations for future challenges by providing valuable input to models and direct examples of how species respond to climate change.
Soil degradation by accelerated erosion is a serious problem and will remain so during the 21st century, especially in developing countries of the tropics and subtropics. Yet, its extent, severity, and economic and environmental impacts are debatable. Estimates of global and regional land area affected are tentative and subjective. Results of field measurements are often technique-dependent. Considerable progress has been made in modeling soil erosion, yet field validation of these models remains to be done for principal soils and ecoregions. Similar to the land area affected, estimates of erosional impacts on crop yield, productivity and soil quality are tentative and subjective. Further, erosion-induced losses on crop yield are scale-dependent because of the compensatory beneficial effects on yields from depositional sites, and technology-dependent because of the masking effects of input such as fertilizers and irrigation. Erosion caused changes in soil carbon dynamics and non-point source water pollution are important environmental impacts. While erosion (e.g., detachment and transport) can lead to emission of trace gases into the atmosphere, deposition can bury and sequester some of the carbon. In addition to improving the database on the land area affected, there is also a need to assess erosional impacts on productivity and soil C balance at the watershed, regional, and global scale. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Current natural resource management seldom takes the ecosystem functions performed by organisms that move between systems
into consideration. Organisms that actively move in the landscape and connect habitats in space and time are here termed “mobile
links.” They are essential components in the dynamics of ecosystem development and ecosystem resilience (that is, buffer capacity
and opportunity for reorganization) that provide ecological memory (that is, sources for reorganization after disturbance).
We investigated the effects of such mobile links on ecosystem functions in aquatic as well as terrestrial environments. We
identify three main functional categories: resource, genetic, and process linkers and suggest that the diversity within functional
groups of mobile links is a central component of ecosystem resilience. As the planet becomes increasingly dominated by humans,
the magnitude, frequency, timing, spatial extent, rate, and quality of such organism-mediated linkages are being altered.
We argue that global environmental change can lead to (a) the decline of essential links in functional groups providing pollination,
seed dispersal, and pest control; (b) the linking of previously disconnected areas, for example, the spread of vector-borne
diseases and invasive species; and (c) the potential for existing links to become carriers of toxic substances, such as persistent
organic compounds. We conclude that knowledge of interspatial exchange via mobile links needs to be incorporated into management
and policy-making decisions in order to maintain ecosystem resilience and hence secure the capacity of ecosystems to supply
the goods and services essential to society.
A wide range of space and time scales characterize the processes and phenomena which interact to shape environmental condition and trends. Important perspectives of environmental space and time include the role of terrestrial and astronomical factors in shaping climatic change, insights to be gained from the pre-historical record, relations between disturbance and biotic responses, episodic extreme events and large-scale phenomena, cumulative impacts, fast — slow processes and memory reservoirs. Scales in physical, chemical and biological phenomena have parallels in human driving forces, societal relations and decision — making processes, and environmental scales of space and time thus have perceptual as well as physical (objective) dimensions. Scale is clearly more than just size and dimension, and there is a growing body of examples on how zooming along and across hierarchical scales can help in seeking explanation (how) and significance (why), and in revealing emergent properties. Scaling can also act as a motor for new approaches to scientific cooperation. Such evolving scales in scientific cooperation are examined in relation to three international research programmes (IBP, MAB, IGBP), to various sub-disciplines of ecology and biogeography, and to the restructuring of a largish research institute in Montpellier (France). An overall conclusion is that scaling issues may provide a stimulus to increased coherence within the science of ecology itself, and may facilitate mutually supportive links with other scientific domains and society at large.
There is plenty of forests in Northeast China which contributes a lot to the conservation of water and land resources, produces
timber products, and provides habitats for a huge number of wild animals and plants. With changes of socio-economic factors
as well as the geophysical conditions, there are dramatic changes on the spatial patterns of forest area. In this sense, it
is of great significance to shed light on the dynamics of forest area changes to find the underlining reasons for shaping
the changing patterns of forest area in Northeast China. To explore the dynamics of forest area change in Northeast China,
an econometric model is developed which is composed of three equations identifying forestry production, conversion from open
forest to closed forest and conversion from other land uses to closed forest so as to explore the impacts on the forest area
changes from demographic, social, economic, location and geophysical factors. On this basis, we employ the Dynamics of Land
System (DLS) model to simulate land-use conversions between forest area and non-forest cover and the land-use conversions
within the sub-classes of forest area for the period 2000–2020 under business as usual scenario, environmental protection
scenario and economic growth scenario. The simulation results show that forest area will expand continuously and there exist
various kinds of changing patterns for the sub-classes of forest area, for example, closed forest will expand continuously
and open forest and shrub will decrease a little bit, while area of other forest will keep intact. The research results provide
meaningful decision-making information for conserving and exploiting the forest resources and making out the planning for
forestry production in the Northeast China region.
Keywordsforest area-forestry production-econometric model-dynamics of land system-Northeast China
It is more and more acknowledged that land-use/cover dynamic change has become a key subject urgently to be dealt with in
the study of global environmental change. Supported by the Landsat TM digital images, spatial patterns and temporal variation
of land-use change during 1995 –2000 are studied in the paper. According to the land-use dynamic degree model, supported by
the 1km GRID data of land-use change and the comprehensive characters of physical, economic and social features, a dynamic
regionalization of land-use change is designed to disclose the spatial pattern of land-use change processes. Generally speaking,
in the traditional agricultural zones, e.g., Huang-Huai-Hai Plains, Yangtze River Delta and Sichuan Basin, the built-up and
residential areas occupy a great proportion of arable land, and in the interlock area of farming and pasturing of northern
China and the oases agricultural zones, the reclamation of arable land is conspicuously driven by changes of production conditions,
economic benefits and climatic conditions. The implementation of “returning arable land into woodland or grassland” policies
has won initial success in some areas, but it is too early to say that the trend of deforestation has been effectively reversed
across China. In this paper, the division of dynamic regionalization of land-use change is designed, for the sake of revealing
the temporal and spatial features of land-use change and laying the foundation for the study of regional scale land-use changes.
Moreover, an integrated study, including studies of spatial pattern and temporal process of land-use change, is carried out
in this paper, which is an interesting try on the comparative studies of spatial pattern on change process and the change
process of spatial pattern of land-use change.
It is widely recognised that nearly all parks and reserves are too small to protect their biological diversity. In response to this problem, we have been developing a multidisciplinary ‘boundary model’ that focuses upon the processes of exchange across the administrative edges of nature reserves. The model incorporates known dynamics from various disciplines and describes the interactions of these forces across the boundary. These disciplines include biogeography, ecology, and human effects, influences and attitudes in an understanding of reserve boundary vulnerability and effectiveness. The boundary model recognises the development of edges in association with the establishment of the administrative boundary. However, it discerns between ‘natural’ and ‘generated’ edges that are based upon the differing stimuli for their development and change. Segmentation of the boundary is recognised as a manifestation of environmental heterogeneity. The boundary model suggests that exposure of the reserve is a major determinate of potential vulnerability. Effectiveness of reserve protection is hypothesised to be more dependent upon what crosses the boundary than upon any internal processes alone.