Scenario farmland protection zoning based on production potential: A case study in China

摘要

Establishing farmland protection areas is an important measure for developing countries to protect limited farmland resources and guarantee food security. The general approaches lack the ability to simulate the farmlands' production potential under different scenarios. This paper proposes a modified farmland protection zoning framework to demarcate farmland protection by coupling the Agro-Ecological Zone (AEZ) model with a state-of-the-art farmland protection zoning framework. The modified zoning framework was applied to China, a typical fast developing country. The results indicated that the average potential production of the entire country would increase by 2.96 % in the coming decade if the irrigation efficiency criteria of 55 % established by the National Program for Agricultural Water Conservation (2012-2020) can be fulfilled. Furthermore, the farmland protection area could also be reduced by 2.91 % (2.96 million ha) while the total production potential of the protected areas would remain unchanged. This study contributes two main aspects: (1) The AEZ model was used as a replacement for the general land-use suitability analysis (LUSA) or multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) based farmland assessment models in a farmland zoning framework, which can accurately assess the production potential of the farmland protection demarcation. (2) This farmland protection zoning approach can analyze and simulate a wide range of scenarios on the effect of environmental factors (climate, soil, terrain, etc.) and human production factors (irrigation condition, cropping system, etc.).