%0 Journal Article
%T Scenario Analyses of Land Use Conversion in the North China Plain: An Econometric Approach
%A Jinyan Zhan
%A Feng Wu
%A Chenchen Shi
%A Fan Zhang
%A Zhihui Li
%J Advances in Meteorology
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/592121
%X Scenario analysis and dynamic prediction of land use structure which involve many driving factors are helpful to investigate the mechanism of land use changes and even to optimize land use allocation for sustainable development. In this study, land use structure changes during 1988¨C2010 in North China Plain were discerned and the effects of various natural and socioeconomic driving factors on land use structure changes were quantitatively analyzed based on an econometric model. The key drivers of land use structure changes in the model are county-level net returns of land resource. In this research, we modified the net returns of each land use type for three scenarios, including business as usual (BAU) scenario, rapid economic growth (REG) scenario, and coordinated environmental sustainability (CES) scenario. The simulation results showed that, under different scenarios, future land use structures were different due to the competition among various land use types. The land use structure changes in North China Plain in the 40-year future will experience a transfer from cultivated land to built-up area, an increase of forestry, and decrease of grassland. The research will provide some significant references for land use management and planning in the study area. 1. Introduction Land use change, as the direct cause and response of regional environment change, has always been one of the core topics of global change research [1]. It is difficult to analyze the relationship between land use and climate change clearly. On the one hand, climate change should exert impacts on the production of cultivated land, forestry, grassland, and so forth. For example, agricultural yields can be directly affected by climate change through changing temperature and precipitation, the distribution of pests, and the frequency of forest fires, and the markets can also be affected by climate change [2]. Moreover, in recent years, there have been a number of literature-analyzed effects of climate change on agricultural production, with the help of some models [3, 4]. From these pieces of literature, we can learn that hedonic price models are widely used to estimate the relationship between county-level farmland values and climate variables such as temperature and precipitation. These models are then used to simulate the effects of climate change on the value of agricultural production [5]. Even so, some researchers think that it is unreasonable to use mean temperature in the analysis of climate change impacts on agriculture [6]. They find that the grain output has a good positive
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amete/2013/592121/