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.