1 INTRODUCTION

Anthropogenic activities have altered the Earth’s land surface, causing substantial degradation and loss of vital ecosystems and the corresponding services they support (Elhacham, Ben-Uri, Grozovski, Bar-On, & Milo, 2020). Land use and cover change under human modification has greatly transformed the Earth’s energy balance and biogeochemical cycles, which contribute to climate change and biodiversity degradation and in turn affect the nature of the land surface and the provision of ecosystem services (Foley et al., 2005; Turner, Lambin, & Reenberg, 2007). Humans depend on land for food, energy, living space, and socioeconomic development (X. P. Song et al., 2018). With a rapidly growing population, the demand for natural resources has increased drastically worldwide (Foley et al., 2011), resulting in widespread degradation and reduction of ecosystem services (Pandit et al., 2019). To effectively cope with these global challenges, the United Nations has crafted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), among which Goal 15 of halting and reversing land degradation mostly pertains to future land planning. However, taking the SDG agenda seriously and implementing it on the ground will be far from easy (Jianguo Liu et al., 2018). With large-scale biodiversity loss and degradation due to unsustainable land development, deforestation, and infrastructure expansion, a set of undesirable consequences-such as the COVID-19 pandemics—may arise and beset mankind (Dobson et al., 2020; Tollefson, 2020).
Rapid urbanization will encroach cropland around municipalities, leading to large-scale loss of arable land. Since the turn of the 21st century, China has stepped into a critical era of rural-urban transition. Widespread and accelerated urbanization has made land resources increasingly scarce, representing a serious challenge to a country like China with a huge population base (Jiang, Deng, & Seto, 2012; J. Liu et al., 2007). During the process of urbanization, built-up land is tremendously expanding (E. F. Lambin et al., 2001), seriously affect food production and consumption systems (Godfray et al., 2010). The cascading effects of such changes may pose an even greater challenge to cropland conservation and thus food security (Davis et al., 2016), leading to deforestation at larger scales, overuse of fertilizer, and other environmental problems (Costello et al., 2020; E. F. Lambin et al., 2001; Long, Zou, Pykett, & Li, 2011; Tan, Li, Xie, & Lu, 2005).
The land use transition theory has been proposed to illustrate land change trajectories in the process of socioeconomic development, which can be used to explain the global pattern related to forest net gain (Eric F. Lambin & Meyfroidt, 2011). Topologies of land use transition includes forest loss (DeFries, Rudel, Uriarte, & Hansen, 2010), rural housing land transition (T. Li, Long, Liu, & Tu, 2015; Long, Heilig, Li, & Zhang, 2007), cropland transformation (Long & Li, 2012; W. Song & Deng, 2015), urban land expansion (Gao, Huang, He, Sun, & Zhang, 2016), and so on. The land use transition theory offers theoretical and technical support for the rational use of natural resources and land (E. F. Lambin & Meyfroidt, 2010; Long & Qu, 2018). With rural-to-urban migration over large scales accompanying urbanization, sustainable use of land becomes a central concern of policy-makers and other stakeholders (Long et al., 2018). The accelerated urbanizing process has triggered a dramatic shift in land use in China, which has been a hot topic of research for many years (Long, 2014).
Maintaining an adequate amount of arable land is a prerequisite for securing food production (Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2015; Foley et al., 2011). Arable land has multifunction, ranging from food production, to social security, and to ecological services (Long, 2020). To ensure food security, China’s central government has executed a series of policies to hold arable land from loss, including the Balance of Arable Land System (BALS) policy, the Basic Cropland Protection System program, and the policy to couple the increase of Urban Construction Land with Reducing Rural Construction Land (Long, Li, Liu, Woods, & Zou, 2012; Shen et al., 2017; Wei Song & Pijanowski, 2014). A common goal of these policies is to maintain the amount of arable land by relocating arable land from adjacent urban areas to remote rural places (Xin & Li, 2018), which may destroy or downgrade the environment in the latter (Y. Liu, Feng, Zhao, Zhang, & Su, 2016). However, the effectiveness of these polices and their impacts on social ecological systems in related areas have not been fully explored. Previous studies have shown widespread deforestation in Zhejiang Province (Xiong, Chen, Xia, Ye, & Anker, 2020) even after the proposed national strategy of ecological protection and ecological civilization. Therefore, more work is needed to understand how these policies caused widespread land degradation.
Institution is a key driver of land change (Stuhlmacher, Turner, Frazier, Kim, & Leffel, 2020). Land use change is influenced by both policy and socioeconomic development in China (Wang, Lin, Glendinning, & Xu, 2018) and elsewhere (Halbac-Cotoara-Zamfir, Keesstra, & Kalantari, 2019). Under China’s accelerated urbanization, land use transformation is mainly represented by the shrinkage of cultivated land and the expansion of construction land at rural-urban fringe areas (Y. S. Liu, Wang, & Long, 2010; Su, Zhou, Wan, Li, & Kong, 2016). Exploring the institutional dimension of land use change may not only contribute to finding solutions for sustainable land use, but also help reform ineffective land use policies (Long et al., 2018). In the present research, we analyze the land use dynamic in Zhejiang Province from 2000 to 2020 using Hanson’s deforestation datasets and Globeland30 remote sensing datasets in conjunction with data from statistical yearbooks and other sources. We aim to reveal: (a) the deforestation process and its linkage to other types of land use change in Zhejiang Province; (b) policy factors that have driven deforestation; (c) the relationships between deforestation and urbanization; and (d) the mechanism in relation to how urbanization in one region has resulted in deforestation in other distant places. This study attempts to contribute to understanding land use change patterns in Zhejiang Province in the context of urbanization, their regional spillover effects, and the corresponding driving forces. In recognition of the challenges related to the “no net loss” policy at large, we aim to promote effective measures towards the goal of sustainable use of land.