Socio-economic driving forces of land-use change in Fuzhou, the southeastern coastal area of China

Since the reform and opening up policy was launched in China in 1978, the society and economy of the southeastern coastal area of China (SCAC) has experienced rapid growth, and great changes have taken place in land-use structure. This paper analyzes the characteristics and major socio-economic driving forces of land-use change in Fuzhou, a typical city in SCAC, using remote sensing (RS) maps, geographic information system (GIS) space analysis and socio-economic data. Based on the RS maps, a change matrix was constructed for detecting the land-use change between 1989 and 2005 through pixel-to-pixel comparison. The result indicated that paddy fields, dry land, and forest land decreased enormously by 42.87%, 27.93% and 4.19% respectively from 1989 to 2005. In contrast, residential, industrial and mining sites, and bare land (including transportation land) increased by 186.20% and 32.72% respectively. In addition, socio-economic data, consisting of 11 indicators like population change, economic development, income and consumption level, investment level, land-use efficiency, land policies, etc., were used to analyze the major driving forces triggering land-use change through multi-linear regression module. The results showed that the population growth, the development of the secondary and tertiary industries, and pursuit of benefits for rural households were the major driving forces contributing to the rapid decrease of cultivated land area in Fuzhou; the fast expansion of its urban land was mainly driven by two factors, i.e., the output per unit area of non-agricultural land and non-agricultural population growth; other factors, such as overall population, output value per unit area of agricultural land, per capita gross domestic product (GDP), per capita disposable income of urban households, and overall social fixed asset investment also played a role in promoting or hindering the expansion of urban land to some extent. Whereas, the increasing strict land policies failed to play dramatic positive role in protecting cultivated land and controlling the rapid increase of urban construction land.