Evaluating the economic and climate adaptation benefits of land conservation strategies in urban coastal regions of the U.S. and China

Abstract

Land conservation has been recognized as a multifunctional adaptive strategy to tackle climate change as it includes the ability to mitigate risk and enhance biodiversity. However, limited empirical studies focus on the climatic adaptive functions of land conservation. Employing various geospatial and statistical techniques, including remote sensing, logistic regression, and landscape metrics, we investigate the effects of land conservation’s spatial characteristics. These characteristics affect the functional efficacy of climate adaptation in urban coastal regions, influencing regional economic vitality in the United States and China. Empirical results indicate that regional economic vitality is positively affected by parks and grassland, patch growth patterns, higher urban density, and closer proximities to coastlines and major roads. In contrast, the core growth form of land conservation has a negative economic effect. Among the estimated variables, we find that the patch growth form of land conservation and closer proximity to higher urban density have the largest positive effects on economic vitality across the study sites. Our findings contribute to both land conservation policy and the climate change literature by uncovering the spatially explicit effects of land conservation related to climate change adaptation.