Population, Land Use, and Environment Research Directions (2005) / Chapter Skim
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8 Economies, Societies, and Landscapes in Transition: Examples from the Pearl River Delta, China, and the Red River Delta, Vietnam--Karen C. Seto
8 Economies, Societies, and Landscapes in Transition: Examples from the Pearl River Delta, China, and the Red River Delta, Vietnam--Karen C. Seto
Pages 193-216
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From page 193... ...
· What are the major human causes of the observed land cover changes? How does the transition from a centrally planned to a marketoriented economy affect land use?
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From page 194... ...
Pearl River Delta, China Over the last two decades, China has been experiencing an urban revolution that is likely to continue through the first half of the twenty-first century. Currently, one-quarter of the 500 largest urban areas in the world are in China, and the country's urban population is predicted to increase to nearly 900 million by 2030 (United Nations, 2002)
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From page 195... ...
policies to attract foreign direct investment and official development assistance; (5) decentralization of fiscal policy; (6)
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From page 196... ...
. Shaped like an inverted triangle covering 16,000 km2, the Red River Delta is often called the "cradle of the Vietnamese civilization." It is one of the country's two major agricultural regions, and produces nearly 40 percent of the country's total output of rice (General Statistical Office, 2003)
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From page 197... ...
Given the agricultural and economic importance of the Red River and Pearl River deltas, the social and political dynamics of transition economies, and the potential for each region to be held up as success cases and duplicated throughout their respective countries, the two deltas were chosen as our study sites to evaluate humanenvironment interactions. Both deltas are particularly rich areas in which to monitor and measure land use dynamics, understand the factors that drive land use change, and evaluate the social and ecological impacts of these changes.
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From page 198... ...
As such, the interrelationship among population, land use, and environment is conceptualized as a "two-by-two" framework that operates in two scales and in two phases. In the first phase, land use change is driven by investments by foreign interests (e.g., foreign direct investment, official development assistance)
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From page 199... ...
One reason is that we evaluate two types of land dynamics: the conversion of agricultural land to urban uses and the conversion of mangroves and rice paddy farms to aquaculture. The decision-making process behind urban land conversion is similar to that in the Pearl River Delta, where multiple administrative levels, but not farmers, are involved with regional and urban planning.
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From page 200... ...
Due to the high degree of land conversion in the region, it was important to obtain a high-frequency time series of satellite data to capture land system dynamics. Most land use change studies evaluate satellite data at three or four points in time, but this would not capture the rapidly changing land processes in the Pearl River Delta.
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From page 201... ...
Although this is not completely surprising given the rate of economic development, the rates of land transformation are nonetheless impressive. The widespread conversion of agricultural land to urban areas in China is not limited to the Pearl River Delta.
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From page 202... ...
. For our study in the Red River Delta, the remote sensing data and processing methods have proven to be more complex than for the Pearl River Delta.
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Because the land transitions in the Red River Delta are not dominated by urbanization and involve other changes (e.g., coastal aquaculture development) , we have looked at different remote sensing techniques for different landscapes.
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From page 204... ...
One reason for pooling the data in this manner is that panel econometric techniques allow account and control for heterogeneity across samples and the ability to develop more complex models; the increase in data points results in more degrees of freedom and hence reduces multicollinearity, provides gains in statistical efficiency, and reduces problems with omitted variable bias. We used fixed and random coefficient models to estimate the rates of land use change from natural ecosystems to urban and from farmland to urban in the Pearl River Delta.
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This is consistent with observations that much of the capital construction in the Pearl River Delta is directed at residential and industrial complexes and new roads. The sign on the coefficient associated with returns to agricultural land relative to industrial uses is also positive.
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From page 206... ...
On the contrary, there may be more pressure to convert natural areas to agricultural land to take advantage of the relative high labor productivity. Our models showed that international investments are one of the primary drivers of urbanization in the Pearl River Delta (Seto and Kaufmann, 2003)
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From page 207... ...
Our preliminary analysis in Vietnam suggests that urban growth is driven primarily by rural to urban migration and the expansion of existing urban centers rather than by new town development (as was the case in the Pearl River Delta)
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From page 208... ...
Coastal changes in the Red River Delta are likely to affect biogeochemical cycling through increased methane flux from the aquaculture ponds. We combined in situ field measurements, pond management data, and remote sensing and found that all ponds were a source of methane flux, with considerably higher fluxes from the mangrove ponds than the paddy ponds (Seto et al., no date)
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From page 209... ...
Industrial estates in the Pearl River Delta often recruit workers from other provinces, thereby increasing the number of floating workers. In the Red River Delta, urban development is driven not so much by large-scale foreign direct investment as by official development assistance.
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From page 210... ...
Urban growth in the Pearl River Delta currently occurs at a breathtaking pace, and high temporal resolution satellite and economic data are necessary to capture the temporal and spatial dynamics of change. We have annual satellite and economic data for the Pearl River Delta, but we found that during 1992-1993, the built-up area increased by nearly 700 km2, roughly 10 times the size of Manhattan.
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From page 211... ...
For our Chinese collaborators, traveling to the Pearl River Delta from Beijing involved not only traveling 2,000 km, but also other challenges, such as a change in language, as the local dialect in southern China is Cantonese but the national language is Mandarin, and obtaining authorization to enter special economic zones, which requires a special permit. Methodological Challenges Land use change tends to be conceptualized in terms of wholesale transformation of the land from one use to another (e.g., agriculture to urban or forest to agriculture)
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From page 212... ...
Methods exist in econometrics, but they have not been widely applied or accepted in land use change studies. Integrated Land System Science: Challenges and Opportunities We have attempted to answer questions related to land system dynamics in rapidly changing economic and political environments in the Pearl River and Red River deltas.
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Woodcock 2000 Modeling the effects of recent land use change on the carbon cycle in the Zhu Jiang Delta region of Southern China. Presented at the 21st Asian Conference on Re mote Sensing, December 4-8, Taipei, Taiwan.
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Seto 2001 Change detection, accuracy, and bias in a sequential analysis of Landsat imagery in the Pearl River Delta, China: Econometric techniques. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 85:95-105.
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Seto, K.C., and R.K. Kaufmann 2003 Modeling the drivers of urban land use change in the Pearl River Delta, China: Integrating remote sensing with socioeconomic data.
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Deal 2003 Urban land-cover change detection through sub-pixel imperviousness mapping us ing remotely sensed data. Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing 69: 1003-1010.
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