Sustainability Assessment On Agricultural Land Use In Pearl River Delta Area Based On The Framework Of DPSIR

Agricultural land resource is the base of human race and the core part of the land resource system. However, under the great pressure of the mass urbanization and upgrowing population, human-land contradiction has become sever.China now is facing great challenges of agricultural land resource in both quantity and quality, which have put great restriction on the urbanization process and urban economic transformation and upgrading evolution. Extensive, resource consuming and polluted agricultural land use has to be reformed. Sustainable agricultural land use and urban ecological agriculture have thus come into the visons of global scholars and policy-makers.The study presented here focuses on the Pearl Delta River area(PDR). Based on the assessment of sustainable agricultural land use for Pearl Delta River area, this study aims to discover how the sustainability of agricultural land use change during the studied period and the key issues standing in the way of sustainable land use in this area with the hope of coming up with suggestions based on the regional development plan and regional specialties for the land planners and managers to wisely retain the urban agricultural space and make land policies. Findings are made through the study.(1) Comprehensive index of sustainability of agricultural land use in PRD shows an undulating decreasing tendency in the studied period from year 1994 to 2012.(2) Four states of fluctuations are shows and have remain steady on the state of primary sustainability in recent years. Based on the outcomes of the assessment, several features of change are found.(1) Mass urbanization index greatly raises the driving index. It is the core driving force to shift the agricultural land use model in PRD area;(2) Geographical linkage between the first-tier and second-tier cities. Development pressure is pushed from the first-tier cities to the second-tier;(3) Policy in the Response Group plays an very important role in shifting the outcomes of assessment;(4) Mass intensive farming activities has added great pressure to the land system and leads to great changes on the pressure index, which urges more comprehensive guides to farmers to improve the soil management and the sustainability of agricultural land use.(5) To promote the technology and talent based urban agriculture of high capital efficiency and ecology well-being is a wise way to improve the state of sustainable agricultural land use. Several issues are further discussed in the paper.(1) The achievement made by mass urbanization and economic development cannot promote the sustainability of agricultural land use in PRD.(2) Overloaded pressure from development and great intensive use reduces the comprehensive index in general, which leads to the problems of agricultural land in quantity and quality. Most importantly, this presents that the ecological value has not been put into the framework of land use efficiency account.(3) Challenges of lack of food provision in cities have become more and more sever in PRD area and which seems cannot be solved only by shipping food from another area due to the crisis of fossil fuel.(4) Policies for agricultural land management shows failure at one time which may relate to the failure of land quality management and the immature public participation in farmland management that lowers the performance of the farmland preservation policies. In the end, several suggestions are made to change the farmland utilization model including to change industrial development philosophy to ecological one, to improve land use planning quality, farming activity regulations, farmland management and law enforcement, to ameliorate the ecological compensation system of agricultural land and promote public participation.