Exploring the interactive coercing relationship between urbanization and ecosystem service value in the Shanghai–Hangzhou Bay Metropolitan Region

The rapid expansion of urban areas and intense human activities have exerted serious impacts on the structure and service functions of ecosystems. Correspondingly, due to the limited amount of ecosystem service value (ESV), ecological environment is doomed to place restriction on disordered sprawl of urban and extensive growth of economy. A clear understanding of the interaction between urbanization and environment is of great significance for formulating regulations of future urban development and eco-environment protection. Taking terrestrial ecosystem services and urbanization as two systems, this research aims at exploring the interactive coercing relationship between urbanization and ESV in the Shanghai–Hangzhou Bay Metropolitan Region (SHB) on the system level and subsystem level. First of all, the value coefficient and information entropy methods were employed to estimate the ESV and urbanization level of each city, respectively. Then, a coupling coordination degree model (CCDM) was used to reveal the interactive coercing relationship between ESV and urbanization. The results showed that the change of land use under urbanization caused the degradation of ecosystem service functions in SHB, and the city with the highest urbanization level (Shanghai) also endured the worst ESV losses. The overall coupling coordination degree (CCD) between urbanization and ESV on the system level displayed an upward trend in SHB. However, the CCDs between several ESV subsystems and urbanization subsystems, such as food production function and demographic urbanization, had deteriorated in Shanghai, Jiaxing and Ningbo. Our study suggested that more consideration should be given to the coordinated and balanced development of different ecosystem services and urbanization, intensification of land use, and maintenance of ecosystem functions in future urban planning and decision making.