Assessing Land Footprint of Urban Agglomeration and Underlying Socioeconomic Drivers

The maintenance of critical natural capital stocks lays a basis for achieving sustainable development across the globe. However, the rapid socioeconomic development in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region in China has been somewhat in conflict with the sustainability of natural capital, particularly in the domain of land use. This, however, remains largely underexplored across the 41 cities partnering the YRD. The aim of this paper is to bring clarity to the sustainability of land as critical natural capital in YRD cities by using an improved three-dimensional land footprint model, as well as to explore the underlying socioeconomic drivers by using spatial econometric models. We find that land use in most YRD cities has been environmentally unsustainable for a long period of time. Cropland is recognized as major source of land flows, experiencing low depletion of land stocks. By contrast, grazing land is found to have poor appropriation of flows, suffering from severe depletion of stocks. Overall, both appropriation of land flows and depletion of land stocks at aggregate level remain relatively stable but geographically uneven, with rich appropriation of flows in the west and north YRD, and intensive depletion of stocks in the northwest and northeast YRD. In addition, the proportion of primary industry added value to GDP and per capita disposable income are identified as major drivers for the YRD’s environmental unsustainability of land use. Our findings call for renewed policies that pinpoint grazing land, fishing grounds and cropland to enable societal prosperity without accelerating the unsustainability of critical natural capital.