Indicators for assessing the ecological and environmental effects of integrated land use planning and their application to a case study

According to the Law of Environment Assessment of China implemented in 2003,land use planning must conduct an assessment of its potential impacts on the environment,as to avoid the adverse environmental impacts of land use restructuring when the land use planning is implemented.For this purpose,this paper developed a procedure and proposed 11 indicators to estimate possible influences of the implementation of land use planning on the ecological security,environmental health,and land resources.These indicators cover five key aspects that may be affected by the implementation of land use planning,including ecological protection,land degradation control,arable land protection,built-up land expansion and its effects,and ecological risk of land reclamation.Further,as a case study,the procedure and indicators were applied to the China's Integrated Land Use Planning of 1997~2010,to examine the feasibility and reliability of the approach and indicators.The results of the case study show that implementation of the land use planning would greatly alleviate the environmental problems particularly of land degradation,enhance the ecosystems service functions,and improve the quality of arable land although the farmland area might decrease due to the built-up land encroachment.It concluded that the indicators can well reveal the potential effects of the implementation of land use planning on the environment,ecosystems and land resources,and thus the assessment is useful and valuable in supporting the land use planners or policymakers to sufficiently consider the environment issues in the formulation and implementation of land use planning.