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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Land Use Dynamics
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1581107
This article is part of the Research TopicMoving Towards Sustainable Development: Exploring the Impact of Land-Use Policies on Land Green Utilization EfficiencyView all 8 articles
Road to green urbanization: How does urbanization process affect the green land use efficiency
Provisionally accepted- 1School of Economics and Management, Henan Polytechnic, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China
- 2Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing, China
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As the process of urbanization accelerates, high energy consumption, pollution, and low land use efficiency have led to many significant negative impacts on production and daily life.In order to investigate the impact of urbanization construction on green land use efficiency and its potential mechanisms, the indicators of China's urbanization evaluation system are constructed, and the SBM-GML model is used to measure green land use efficiency. Based on this, data from 30 provinces in China from 2013 to 2023 are used to test them using fixed effects, mediating effects and threshold effects.(1) The construction of the urbanization process can directly contribute to the improvement of green efficiency in land use. This conclusion remains valid after conducting endogeneity and robustness tests. (2) The mediating effect test shows that the urbanization process can increase synergistic industrial agglomeration and promote the optimization of the industrial structure, thus indirectly promoting the improvement of green land use efficiency.(3) The threshold effect test shows that a threshold effect exists in the relationship between the level of economic development and green land use efficiency, based on the urbanization process. As urbanization deepens, the role of economic development in improving green land use efficiency gradually strengthens. (4) Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the construction of the urbanization process has a more significant impact on driving green land use efficiency in cities in eastern China.Discussion: This paper suggests optimizing the allocation of land resources in the process of accelerating urbanization and improving the efficiency of land use in terms of green.Attention should be given to the regional differences in carbon emissions during urbanization, and it is essential to continuously optimize the realized low-carbon urbanization model. Special attention should be paid to enhancing carbon emission control in underdeveloped regions, in order to promote the nationwide improvement of green land use efficiency.
Keywords: Urbanization process, green land use efficiency, super-efficient EBM, synergistic industrial agglomeration, threshold effect
Received: 21 Feb 2025; Accepted: 08 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yang, Wang, Xu and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ke Xu, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing, China
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