Research On Land Use/Cover Change And Its Effects On Regional Carbon Emissions In Shanghai, China

Land use has played an important role in causing rapid increase of greenhouse gas emissions. Understanding the spatio-temporal patterns, driving mechanisms of land use/cover change and its effects on regional carbon emissions are extremely important to improving the efficiency of land use management and achieving low-carbon-target-oriented land use planning. By coupling geospatial data with socio-economic statistics, the dissertation analyzes the spatio-temporal dynamic patterns and driving mechanisms of land use/cover change in Shanghai, the most developed metropolitan area in China. On this basis, the dissertation highlights policy and socio-economic factors driving changes in land use/land cover area and physical determinants affacting the spatial distribution of land use/cover change using multivariable and logistic regression methods. Furthermore, the dissertation evaluates the effects of land use/cover change on regional carbon emissions from both direct and indirect perspectives. The major finding is that in the past 23 years, land use/land cover in Shanghai has gone through rapid-moderate-accelerating change stages. The built-up area encroaching from cropland reached 1230.7 km2, and the increase in urban population and the boom in regional economies were the major drivers of built-up area expansion. From the perspective of geophysical determinants, the spatial pattern of buil-up area expansion has mainly been influenced by accessibility to the city center and transport network, together with constraints inherent in existing land-use patterns. From 1990 to 2013, carbon emissions directly originating from conversions between different land use/land cover types were 641.17 GgC, and the variation tendency is consistent with that of land use/cover change. From 1998 to 2013, carbon emissions from energy consumption which occurring on different land use/land cover types were rising from 18.20 TgC to 34.90 TgC, among which industrial land has the largest proportion and highest intensity. In the future, urban planners could adopt effective countermeasures to conduct high-efficiency and low-carbon land use planning and management from both quantitative structure and spatial pattern to strive for regional sustainablity.