Increased corn cultivation exacerbated crop residue burning in Northeast China in the 21st century

Abstract

China’s endeavors to mitigate recurrent crop residue burning (CRB) and improve air quality have yielded positive results owing to recent pollution prevention policies. Nonetheless, persistent challenges remain, particularly in the Northeast China (NEC), where low temperature complicates crop residue management. Here, we examined the effects of cropping pattern adjustment on variations of CRB patterns in NEC during 2001–2021, utilizing the Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) burned area dataset, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) active fire dataset, and the high-accuracy crop planting area maps. Our results revealed an overall upward trend of 805.96 km²/yr in NEC CRB from 2001 to 2021. The corn CRB area accounted for more than 50% of the total CRB area in each CRB-intensive year (2013–2021), and the increasing corn CRB generally aligns with the growing corn cultivation fields. A seasonal shift in CRB was found around 2017, with intensive CRB activities transitioning from both autumn and spring to primarily spring, particularly in the Songnen Plain and Sanjiang Plain. The changing trend of PM_2.5 concentration aligned spatially with the shift. Moreover, the CRBs in spring of 2020 and 2021 were more severe than the major burning seasons in previous years, likely due to the disruptions during COVID-19 lockdowns. In certain years, the explanatory power of spring CRB on PM_2.5 concentration was comparable to that of other natural factors, such as precipitation. This study underscores the critical need for sustained and region-specific strategies to tackle the challenges posed by CRBs.

Keywords

Crop residue burning / Northeast China / Burned area / Active fire / Cropping pattern adjustment

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yiqun Shang: Writing – original draft, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Yanyan Pei: Formal analysis, Conceptualization. Ping Fu: Writing – review & editing, Validation, Supervision, Methodology, Formal analysis, Data curation. Chuantao Ren: Resources, Methodology. Zhichao Li: Supervision, Software, Investigation. Jianfeng Ren: Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Investigation, Formal analysis. Xinqi Zheng: Writing – review & editing, Software, Resources. Yuanyuan Di: Writing – review & editing, Software, Resources. Yan Zhou: Methodology, Data curation, Conceptualization. Jinwei Dong: Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFD1500200), the funding project of Northeast Geological S&T Innovation Center of China Geological Survey (Grant No. QCJJ2022–9), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA28060100), the Youth Interdisciplinary Team Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (JCTD-2021–04), the Informatization Plan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. CAS-WX2021PY-0109), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 41971078, 42271375, 72221002, 42001378).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2024.09.008.

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