Identification of urban land use efficiency by indicator-SDG 11.3.1

PLoS One. 2020 Dec 28;15(12):e0244318. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0244318. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

Inefficiency in urban land use is one of the problems caused by rapid urbanization. The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicator 11.3.1 is designed to test urban land use efficiency. This study employed geospatial and statistical data to compute land use efficiencies from 1990 to 2015 with five 5-year and ten 15-year intervals in Wukang, center of Deqing County, China. A flowchart was designed to extract the built-up lands from multiple data sources. The produced built-up lands were demonstrated to provide good accuracy by constructing an error matrix between the extracted and manually interpreted built-up lands as classified and reference images, respectively. By using the model provided by UN metadata to calculate SDG 11.3.1, the land use efficiencies from 1990 to 2015 were identified in Wukang. Our results indicate that the land use efficiency in Deqing County center is lower than the average of cities around the world, primarily because our in-situ study focused on a county center with larger rural regions than urban areas. Over the long term, urban land use becomes denser as the population grows, which will have a positive impact on the sustainability of urban development. This work is helpful for the local government to balance urban land consumption and population growth.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • China
  • Cities
  • Conservation of Natural Resources / methods
  • Conservation of Natural Resources / trends
  • Humans
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Population Growth
  • Sustainable Development / economics*
  • Sustainable Development / trends
  • Urban Population / trends
  • Urban Renewal / methods*
  • Urban Renewal / trends
  • Urbanization / trends*

Grants and funding

This work is financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation (NSFC) (Key Project #41390650), the Land Use Change Detection from Satellite GF-7 by Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People’s Republic of China (No. 06-Y20A17-9001-17/18), and by The Fundamental Research Funds for Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture (No. 2018N060301). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.