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How to minimize the impacts of urban expansion on farmland loss: developing a few large or many small cities?

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Abstract

Context

In China, large cities are often held to blame for the drastic loss of high-quality farmland. However, others propose that the development of large cities should be prioritized for their scale economy in saving farmland. A policy debate remains regarding which urbanization mode—developing a few large or many small cities—can minimize the impacts of urban expansion on farmland loss.

Objective

The present study aims to clarify the controversy by quantifying the quantity and quality of urbanization-encroached farmland (UEF) in different sizes of cities.

Methods

We proposed two indexes to quantify the UEF among different sizes of cities during 2000–2010: “the UEF area per urban population growth” and “the average potential yield of UEF”. Furthermore, we proposed a spatial prioritization matrix to facilitate place-based policy design for UEF management.

Results

The super large cities (SLC) consumed the least UEF area per urban population growth and also the lowest average potential yield of UEF. However, there were large variations within city categories in both the quality and quantity dimensions. Farmland loss to urban expansion is determined by a city’s biophysical and socio-political conditions.

Conclusions

Our analyses show that urban growth of SLC consumed smaller quantity of farmland when accommodating a certain amount of urban population. Containing the development of large cities in the name of food security is ineffective, which will cause double failures in farmland preservation and urban development. As the impacts of urban expansion on farmland loss are highly place-variant and urban sustainability is more than just food security, place-based policies following the landscape sustainability perspective are needed to address urban encroachment of farmland.

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Acknowledgements

We sincerely thank Prof. Jianguo Wu and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. We also thank Dr. Hongfang Zhao and Dr. Fang Zhao for their assistance at an early stage of preparing the manuscript. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41901322, No. 41801314).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Lab of Geographic Information Science (Ministry of Education), School of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200241, People’s Republic of China

    Guohua Hu, Xia Li & Xing Meng

  2. School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Bing-Bing Zhou

  3. School of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, 200234, People’s Republic of China

    Qun Ma

  4. College of Natural Resources and Environment, Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Land Use and Consolidation, and Key Laboratory of the Ministry of Land and Resources for Construction Land Transformation, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, 510642, People’s Republic of China

    Yilun Liu

  5. School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, People’s Republic of China

    Yimin Chen & Xiaoping Liu

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  1. Guohua Hu
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  2. Xia Li
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  3. Bing-Bing Zhou
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  8. Xiaoping Liu
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Correspondence to Xia Li or Bing-Bing Zhou.

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Hu, G., Li, X., Zhou, BB. et al. How to minimize the impacts of urban expansion on farmland loss: developing a few large or many small cities?. Landscape Ecol 35, 2487–2499 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01073-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-020-01073-x

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