Green Infrastructure Offset the Negative Ecological Effects of Urbanization and Storing Water in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area, China

Qipeng Liao, Zhe Wang and Chunbo Huang
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Qipeng Liao: School of Arts and Communication, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430078, China
Zhe Wang: School of Arts and Communication, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430078, China
Chunbo Huang: Research Center for Spatial Planning and Human-Environment System Simulation, School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan 430078, China

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 21, 1-19

Abstract: Land use planning usually increases the uncertainties of the ecosystem structures and functions because various human demands usually bring both positive and negative ecological effects. It is critical for estimating various land use changes and their ecological effects, but the previous studies have failed to decouple the respective and the combined effects of different land use changes on ecosystem services. Net primary productivity (NPP) could be used to indicate many ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration and storage. Here, we employed a light use efficiency model to estimate the spatial and temporal dynamics of NPP in the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) area from 2000 to 2015, and designed four scenarios to analyze the relative roles of afforestation, urbanization and storing water on NPP dynamics. Our results documented that terrestrial NPP of the TGR area increased from 547.40 gC•m ?2 to 629.96 gC•m ?2 , and carbon sequestration capacities were 31.66 TgC (1Tg = 10 12 g) and 36.79 TgC in 2000 and 2015, respectively. Climate change and land use change both could contribute to carbon sequestration with 4.08 TgC and 1.05 TgC. Among these land use changes, only afforestation could sequester carbon with 2.04 TgC, while urbanization-induced and impoundment-induced emissions were 0.12 TgC and 0.32 TgC, respectively, and other land use changes also could release 0.55 TgC of carbon. This finding suggested that although positive and negative environmental effects happened simultaneously over the past decades, green infrastructure could effectively offset the carbon emissions from urbanization and storing water in the TGR area, which provides some fundamental supports for further ecological restoration and contributes to empowering land use policies towards carbon sequestration and storage at the regional scale.

Keywords: land use change; landscape planning; ecosystem services; ecological restoration; Carnegie–Ames–Stanford Approach (CASA) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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