Spatial-Temporal Changes and Driving Factors of Land-Use Eco-Efficiency Incorporating Ecosystem Services in China

1. Introduction

Ecosystem services (ES) are goods and services that are directly or indirectly related to human well-being and sustainability, and the supply of ecosystem services is subject to specific land-use structures and patterns [1]. However, emerging evidence shows that land-use changes can make fundamental impacts on ecosystem services provisioning [2]. It has been estimated that the global loss of ES value (ESV) can reach 4.3–20.2 trillion USD/year due to the land-use change [3]. A significant decline in global loss of ES value is also reported in China, which is 4.18–91.09 billion USD from 1988 to 2008 [4]. Moreover, in a small region of Nigeria, land-use changes led to a 4.83% decline in total ESV during 2000–2010 [5]. Facing this increasingly worsening situation, it has great significance to enhance the sustainable development through considering the ESV losses.

In principle, expansion of built-up land would change local land-use structures and patterns, thus directly affecting the supply of ES. For example, the heavy use of cultivated land will exert direct impacts on food production [6,7]. On the other hand, the land-use changes can strongly affect local climatic conditions [8], resulting in indirect responses of ESV to land-use changes, such as biodiversity loss [9]. Therefore, the trade-off between economic benefits and ESV losses needs to be addressed in the process of rapid urbanization. The dissection of the trade-off can provide important clues for sustainable development [10,11]. Currently, scholars have conducted a lot of meaningful work to ease this trade-off. For example, payments for ecosystem services (PES) is recommended as an efficient economic tool that can internalize the ecological cost into specific policy making [12]. In addition, economists are trying to construct a framework of the System of Environmental and Economic Accounting (SEEA), which can provide valuable information for sustainable policy-making [13].

In the process of urbanization in China, there are many issues associated with land-use, such as disordered exploitation, leave unused, low land-use efficiency, and so on [14,15]. Intensive land-use has been considered as an effective way to improve land-use efficiency. In general, high land-use efficiency means more economic benefits with less inputs per unit area [16]. The economic output per unit area has been used to represent land-use efficiency [17]. More generally, the non-parametric model, slacks-based model...