Spatiotemporal interaction between ecosystem services and urbanization in China: Incorporating the scarcity effects

The unprecedented rate of urbanization in China since 1978 has profoundly impacted its landscape and threatened ecosystem sustainability. To devise effective sustainable development policy, it is imperative to quantify the relationships between urbanization and ecosystem services in a spatially explicit manner. For this purpose, ecosystem service value (ESV) is commonly adopted, especially, in evaluating the changes of ecosystem services in terms of physical supply capacities. Existing research efforts, however, rarely considered the scarcity caused by the supply-demand dynamics, which was incorporated into ESV, or succinctly, ecosystem service scarcity value (ESSV). In addition, they tended to focus on the local and regional levels, leaving unattended the national level analysis that carries important policy implications. This paper fills this gap by quantifying first the spatiotemporal patterns of ESSV and their changes at the province level for China, and second the spatial variations of the relationship between urbanization and ecosystem services employing geographically weighted regression (GWR) model. The results showed that the ESSV was highest in the southeast and lowest in the northwest in China and the total ESSV in all provinces trended upward from 1990 to 2015. The population growth, urban land expansion, and economic growth due to urbanization were clearly higher in the eastern coastal areas and the areas along the Yangtze River than in other regions. The ESSV and gross domestic product growth of developed regions both shared the same growth trend over time; in particular developed regions saw a sharper increase than less developed regions. This showed a positive correlation between the ESSV of a region and its economic situation. The changes of spatial impacts of urbanization on ESSV were mainly driven by regional development policy, which was confirmed by the results from GWR. Therefore, promoting a holistic view of land use functions with socioeconomic activities, such as maintaining a balanced urban development, implementing ecological compensation and strengthening regional cooperation across administrative boundaries, is encouraged to reconcile the conflict between urbanization and ecosystem management.