Abstract
Rapid urban expansion has profoundly affected the structure and function of ecosystem services. However, reliable empirical evidence of the spatiotemporal impact of urban sprawl on ecosystem services remains scant. In this paper, we employ the dynamic spatial Durbin model to explore the relationship between urban sprawl and ecosystem services using prefecture-level panel data from 2000 to 2015. The heterogeneous impact of urban sprawl on ecosystem services and the effectiveness of urbanization management policies are further examined and investigated. Our main finding is that urban ecosystem services have significant spatial agglomeration and path-dependent effects. Urban sprawl in resource-based, noncoastal, and small cities has a greater negative impact on local ecosystem services and a positive impact on neighboring regions. Furthermore, the low-carbon city policy and ecological civilization construction policy significantly restrain urban sprawl, but the former has a limited effect on improving ecosystem service value. Policy implications are proposed to pursue synergies between urban development and ecosystem services improvement for China and other emerging countries.
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Data will be made available upon reasonable request.
Notes
The details of the introduction and evolution of the ecological civilization construction policy are discussed in Guidelines for Promoting Ecological Civilization Construction proposed by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment in December 2008. For a more detailed discussion about the low-carbon city construction policy and its effects, see (Cheng et al. 2019).
The Lagrange multiplier test and likelihood ratio test are applied to test spatial dependence and select the model (see Online Resource 5). The results suggest that ecosystem service value has spatial agglomeration effects and that the SDM does not degenerate to either a spatial autoregressive model or a spatial error model.
Considering the changes in ecosystem services could affect urbanization patterns, we can also explore such a potential feedback effect to thoroughly understand their causal relationship. We thank the anonymous reviewer for raising this crucial question and would suggest this as an interesting topic for future research.
The target responsibility system refers to a system that considers the quantitative assessment of ecological environment protection and governance in evaluating the performance of the magistrate (Lo 2014).
While secondary data sources may introduce other potential measurement errors or biases, recalculating the urban sprawl index in the robustness check can help mitigate them to some extent. We further argue that the findings concluded in this paper will also be sustained when the first-hand data or other secondary data sources are available. We leave a rigorous investigation as an interesting topic for future research.
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We are very grateful for the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71991482) and the National Social Science Foundation of China (No. 19ZDA112).
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Yi, J., Dai, S., Cheng, J. et al. How urban sprawl affects local and nearby ecosystem services in China. Reg Environ Change 23, 139 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-023-02124-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-023-02124-0