Urban-rural disparities of carbon storage dynamics in China's human settlements driven by population and economic growth

Huiping Jiang; Huadong Guo; Zhongchang Sun; Xiongfeng Yan; Jinlin Zha; Haili Zhang; Sijia Li

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162092

Urban-rural disparities of carbon storage dynamics in China's human settlements driven by population and economic growth

Sci Total Environ. 2023 May 1:871:162092. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162092. Epub 2023 Feb 11.

Authors

Huiping Jiang¹, Huadong Guo², Zhongchang Sun³, Xiongfeng Yan⁴, Jinlin Zha⁵, Haili Zhang⁶, Sijia Li⁷

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China; International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing 100094, China.
² Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China; International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing 100094, China. Electronic address: hdguo@radi.ac.cn.
³ Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China; International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, Beijing 100094, China; Key Laboratory for Earth Observation of Hainan Province, Hainan Research Institute, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sanya 572029, China. Electronic address: sunzc@aircas.ac.cn.
⁴ College of Surveying and Geo-Informatics, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and Processes in the Boundary Layer over the Low-Latitude Plateau Region, Department of Atmospheric Science, Yunnan University, Kunming 650091, China.
⁶ Key Laboratory of Tropical Biological Resources of Ministry of Education, College of Tropical Crops, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China.
⁷ College of Mathematics and Physics, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu 610059, China.

PMID: 36775148
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.162092

Abstract

China has experienced a rapid expansion of human settlement in both urban and rural areas over the past three decades. Regarding the impacts on carbon storage, previous studies that only focus on certain ecosystems cannot reflect urban-rural disparities, resulting in the carbon storage changes in human settlement remaining unknown. In this study, we aimed to explore China's urban-rural disparities in human settlement expansion and direct impacts on carbon storage by using the big Earth data technology. The results showed that from 1990 to 2018, the total amount of China's human settlement expansion reached 175,703.80 km², and the inner-city, peri-urban, and rural components accounted for 21.00 %, 20.18 %, and 58.82 %, respectively. Along with the general tendency of impervious surface area (ISA) growth, there was more soil organic carbon (SOC) (1254.33 TgC) being sealed beneath ISA (0-100 cm depth), compared to a huge reduction in vegetation biomass carbon (VBC) (91.44 TgC) during the study period. The results further indicated that the change density of either VBC or SOC presented a slightly rising trend along the urban-rural gradient, due to the increasingly common encroachment on vegetation and soil types with higher carbon content. We also found that socioeconomic drivers had a greater influence in urban areas than rural areas, and the related correlation exhibited a descending trajectory in both urban and rural areas. There is thus an urgent need to preserve lands with abundant carbon storage and contain the waste of land resources in rural areas. All stakeholders should pay more attention to concerted and targeted regulation policies for well-planned and eco-friendly human settlement expansion such as enhancing rural land use efficiency and promoting large-scale afforestation and continuous urban greening, which will be critical not only for guiding sustainable urbanization all over China but also for mitigating climate change for the entire world.

Keywords: Big Earth data; Carbon storage change; China; Rural revitalization; Soil sealing; Urban expansion.

MeSH terms

Carbon* / analysis
China
Economic Development
Ecosystem*
Humans
Soil
Urbanization

Substances

Carbon
Soil