Sharing or sparing? The trade-offs among urban services, food production and ecosystem services

Abstract

As urbanization continues to spread rapidly, the competition for space among urban, agricultural, and natural land uses is becoming increasingly fierce. The urgent question is how to harness the advantages of urbanization while mitigating its potentially harmful consequences. This research extends analytical framework of land sharing and sparing to urban land use and provides a comparable quantification approach to determine the comprehensive impact of urban services, food production, and ecosystem services. The results show that the overall value loss of the land sparing scenario is 23.6% lower than that of the sharing scenario on average, and the Eco-sparing scenario exhibits the smallest loss, which is only 55.4% of that under the Urb-sharing scenario. While land-sparing strategies mitigate the loss of local food production and ecosystem services, fostering a potentially mutually beneficial outcome, they also elevate the cost of accessing urban services. This creates a delicate trade-off between urban services and food production/ecosystem services, ultimately posing challenges in achieving an optimal win-win situation. The key contribution of this paper lies in extending the land sharing and sparing framework to urban areas, agricultural land, and ecosystems. It also introduces methods to quantitatively assess trade-offs among these land uses. This extended framework for land use offers insights into spatial competition due to urbanization and provides decision-making analysis tools for land use and planning.