Industrial land expansion in rural China threatens environmental securities

Highlights

• China’s rural industrial land (RIL) area quadrupled from 1990 to 2015.

• RIL expansion cost 9% of China’s crop production and threatened human/ecosystem safety.

• The underprivileged population bears a disproportionally large share of the risks.

Abstract

China’s rural industrialization has been a major driver for its rapid economic growth during the recent decades, but its myriad environmental risks are yet to be fully understood. Based on a comprehensive national land-use data set, our study shows that the area of China’s rural industrial land (RIL) quadrupled during 1990–2015, reaching 39000 km² in 2015, comparable to urbanization in magnitude but with a much greater degree of landscape fragmentation which implies stronger ecological and environmental impacts. About 91% of the protected areas in the central China were within 50 km from rural industrial land, thus exposed to industrial disturbances. Accelerated rural industrial land expansion, particularly in regions under high geo-hazard risks, led to dramatically increased environmental risks, threatening the safety and health of both rural industrial workers and residents. Moreover, negative effects from rural industrial land expansion could partially offset the crop production growth in recent decades. The underprivileged rural population in the west bears a disproportionally large share of the increased environmental risks. China urgently needs to design and implement sustainable policies to restrict and reshape its rural industrialization. This study aims to inspire policy makers and researchers to rethink the current model of industrial expansion and improve rural industrial land planning, which is important for achieving the sustainable development goals of China.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Industrialization / Land-use change / Environment risks / Environmental security / Urbanization / China

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Acknowledgements

We thank the editor and reviewers for their constructive suggestions which help greatly to improve this manuscript. We thank H. M. Yan and A. L. Liu for providing technical support and data set, and J. Broderick for helping us improve the writing. Funding: This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFC1800103), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31770515), the National Key Basic Research Program of China (Grant No. 2014CB954300), the Major Projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41590842) and the National Key Basic Research Program of China (No. 2010CB950900). Chi Zhang was supported by the Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong, China (ts201712071) and the Tianshan Talent Scholars Program of Xinjiang.

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