Exploring provincial sustainable intensification of cultivated land use in China: An empirical study based on emergy analysis

The over-intensification of cultivated land has created increasingly obvious negative effects that threatened national food security. The sustainable intensification of cultivated land use (SICLU) has become a critical path to balance the economic and ecological benefits of agricultural production. However, the definition and evaluation of SICLU is still incomplete, and the systematic study of SICLU is lacking. This paper built an SICLU evaluation index system based on emergy analysis and used it to determine the SICLU during 2000–2017 in China. And then the influencing factors of SICLU were investigated. We found that: (1) the overall SICLU in China has a weak “U”-shaped trend, first decreasing during 2000–2006 and then increasing during 2007–2017; (2) the Western region has the highest average value of SICLU, followed by the Northeastern and Central regions, and then the Eastern region during 2000–2017; (3) the spatial-temporal pattern of the SICLU reveals that the number of provinces with low level (the first or second grade) slightly decreased generally, the number of provinces with medium level (the third or fourth grade) increased in general, while the number of provinces with high value (the fifth or sixth grade) has been small and stable; (4) the influencing factors indicate that rural per capita net income and per capita planting area of crops play significant roles in promoting the SICLU, while the agricultural disaster rate, effective irrigation rate, multiple cropping index, and rural labor non-agricultural employment rate have significant inhibitory effects on the SICLU at the national level. These findings capture the resource and environmental performance of the cultivated land use system and have important implications for promoting cultivated land intensive use transition and the sustainable development of agriculture in China. • An evaluation index system was established to evaluate the SICLU based on emergy analysis. • The outputs of cultivated land use include agricultural products, ecosystem services and agricultural wastes. • The spatial-temporal pattern and influencing factors of SICLU in China were explored. • Suggestions were proposed to improve the SICLU level and promote cultivated land green transformation.