Identifying suitable areas for cropland and urban development in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is a rapidly urbanizing region home to 36 million people. However, it is also a hotspot for biodiversity conservation and a key provider of ecosystem services for Asia. Therefore, there is notable conflict between the needs for ecosystem protection and land development for food production and urbanization as the region’s population continues to grow and urban areas develop further. To resolve this conflict, ecosystem protection indicators, including protected area, ecological degradation, and the importance of ecosystem services, must be intertwined with cropland and urban land development. We identified suitable areas for cropland and urban within the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and then evaluated the potential impacts under four scenarios: ecological protection priority, balanced consideration, development area priority, and conventional scenario. Under the ecological protection priority scenario, the total suitable areas for cropland and urban are 16507.76 km² and 3339.61 km², respectively, and their total area accounted for 0.69 % in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. In addition, the loss of key ecosystem services is less than 3.33 % under the scenario, which is the smallest loss among all scenarios. Correspondingly, the grain yield and the gross regional product are expected to increase by 30.15 % and 88.88 %, respectively. This is especially notable as ecosystem services decreased by 8.01 %–16.30 % under the conventional scenario. Therefore, we recommend land development under the ecological protection priority scenario for the Qinghai-Tibet plateau. Our research provides a reference for the sustainability of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.