An ecosystem elasticity perspective of paddy ecosystem sustainability evaluation: The case of China
Introduction
Due to the impact from increased population, global warming, the coronavirus pandemic, and other natural disasters, such as large-scale drought and flooding, the Earth’s ecosystem is facing unprecedented challenges and food supply shortage has become an increasing global concern. For instance, the world population is projected to increase from 5.7 billion in 1995 to 8 billion in 2040. Farming is rapidly dwindling thanks to large-scale urbanization (Xie, G. D., 2017). The annual availability of water resources per person in 2016 was 37% lower than in 1970 as the world’s population expanded rapidly (Steffen et al., 2015). Human survival and development are severely threatened by food problems, reduced biodiversity, degradation of forests, grasslands, and wetlands, pollution of atmosphere and water, and frequent occurrence of extreme weather and natural disasters. With these threats, the sustainability of the ecosystem is particularly important, as it points directly to human survival.
The agricultural ecosystem has the greatest impact on people’s basic life and ecological sustainability (Steffen et al., 2015). As rice is one of the major foods in the world, the paddy ecosystem plays an especially important role in the global ecosystem. A comprehensive evaluation of paddy ecosystem sustainability is conducive to strengthening agricultural ecosystem management (Amiri et al., 2019), promoting food supply and agricultural ecological sustainability, and ensuring ecological security.
The importance of the sustainability of the paddy ecosystem, coupled with worsening environmental, economic, and population problems, has led to calls for innovative approaches to sustainability evaluation of paddy ecosystem (Quintero-Angel and Gonzalez-Acevedo, 2018). Sustainability refers to a system’s ability to continue its operation in the future (Hassani et al., 2019). The sustainability of an ecosystem is essentially its capability to consistently provide the levels of services to support the wellbeing of human beings (Chen et al., 2020; Norton, 1992). Ecosystem services are critical to the functioning of the Earth’s life-support system (Costanza et al., 1997) as it reflects environmental conditions and effects caused and maintained by the environment and the ecological processes (Chen et al., 2020). The defining feature of a sustainable ecosystem is its “consistency” in the offering of services, or its resilience in face of certain levels of pollution and degrading of the ecosystem due to ecological, economic and social activities (Chen et al., 2020).
Prior studies on the evaluation of sustainability of an ecosystem are focused mostly on direct and/or indirect economic contributions of ecosystem services. They have failed to consider the ecosystem costs, or the negative effects incurred by the human activities during the paddy cultivation. Moreover, the evaluation indicators of paddy ecosystem sustainability in prior research are not adequately comprehensive, and the evaluation methods proposed often fail to take into account environmental, economic, social, and other important indicators in a holistic manner. We fill these research gaps by proposing a holistic, innovative, and elasticity-based, approach to sustainability evaluation, which considers the negative, as well as positive, effects of human activities during the paddy cultivation. Elasticity, usually used in Economics to describe how sensitive the demand or supply is to changes in price or income (Zeng et al., 2018; Zhu et al., 2018), is a feasible instrument to evaluate the sustainability of ecosystems.
In this research, we first choose the net value of ecosystem service (NVES) as the core measurement of sustainability. Then, following the Durbin Metrology Model, we select a series of ecological, economic, and social indicators, which reflect the main driving forces of a paddy ecosystem. We use the data from 30 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions (referred to as 30 districts in the remainder of the paper) in China from 2008 to 2017 to calculate the paddy ecosystem elasticity based on those indicators. Finally, we classify the paddy ecosystem sustainability of the 30 districts into three ranks based on their ecosystem elasticity values.
The research constitutes substantial contributions to theory and business practice. First, we propose a novel quantitative method for sustainability evaluation based on the net value of ecosystem service, consisting of a new elasticity-based sustainability evaluation framework for both agricultural ecosystems and the Earth ecosystem as a whole. Second, we apply our proposed approach to evaluate the paddy systems in China. The evaluation process provides business managers and policy makers, who are concerned about the sustainability of ecosystems, with concrete guidance on how to use our evaluation methodology. Third, the results of our sustainability evaluation of the paddy ecosystem in China shed light on the condition of ecosystem sustainability and offer empirical evidence that government agencies and businesses may draw upon for ecosystem sustainability initiatives.
Section snippets
Literature review
The evaluation of the sustainability of paddy ecosystem is key to assessing existing conditions of ecosystem services and to formulating policies and guidelines for future ecosystem-related human developments. Various perspectives pertaining to the evaluation of paddy ecosystem sustainability co-exist in the literature. The evaluation of sustainability, such as the land use sustainability (Rao et al., 2018), biodiversity sustainability (Elena et al., 2015; Alex, 2019), and ecosystem
Development of sustainability evaluation methodology
Ecosystem services satisfy the fundamental needs of human survival, and they are especially crucial for the development of human society (De Groot et al., 2012). Cost and value generation are dialectical. An effective evaluation system should be able to capture both of them. The existing ecosystem service-valuation mechanisms often ignore the costs of ecosystem services and thus cannot help formulate reasonable ecological compensation policies (Zhai et al., 2010).
The net value of ecosystem
Study area
In China, rice is one of the most important cereal crops, with 30 million ha planting areas, accounting for nearly one-third of China’s total crop lands (Zhu et al., 2018) and consuming about 32% of the world’s nitrogen fertilizers (Zhai et al., 2010). The main rice production areas are the Sanjiang Plain in the northeast, the Yangtze River Basin, and the vast areas south of the Yangtze River. The NVES of China in 2017 is about 1.35 × 1012 yuan, and the ANVES is 4402 yuan per ha. China’s
Spatial autocorrelation test
Taking into account the widely applied Moran’s I indices and the needs of this study, we perform a spatial autocorrelation test on the explained variables (ANVES). Test result indicators I range from −1 to 1. The greater the absolute value of I, the greater the degree of spatial correlation among the explained variables. I = 0 indicates that the tested value has no spatial correlation. MATLAB software is used to calculate the spatial Moran’s I indicators of ANVES in 30 districts of China from
Discussion
Comprehensive evaluation of the sustainability of paddy ecosystems is key to success in paddy ecosystem management, which determines the security of global food supply. In this study, we propose a novel quantitative method for sustainability evaluation based on the net value of ecosystem services, which consists of a new elasticity-based sustainability evaluation framework for agricultural ecosystems. Our approach employs the paddy ANVES to assess the paddy ecosystem elasticity and
Funding
This work was supported by the Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Hunan Province [Grant No. 19YBQ083]; Scientific Research Project of Hunan Provincial Department of Education [Grant No. 20C1288]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants No. 72003144].
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Teng Yang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Data curation, Writing - original draft. YanHua Sun: Investigation, Validation. Xiaolin Li: Visualization, Supervision, Writing - review & editing. Qiangyi Li: Methodology, Software, Validation.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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