Futures of global urban expansion: uncertainties and implications for biodiversity conservation
By Burak Güneralp, Karen C. Seto. 2013
329 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Urbanization will place significant pressures on biodiversity across the world. However, there are large uncertainties in the amount and location of future urbanization, particularly urban land expansion. Here, we present a global analysis of urban extent circa 2000 and probabilistic forecasts of urban expansion for 2030 near protected areas and in biodiversity hotspots. We estimate that the amount of urban land within 50 km of all protected area boundaries will increase from 450 000 km2 circa 2000 to 1440 000 ± 65 000 km2 in 2030. Our analysis shows that protected areas around the world will experience significant increases in urban land within 50 km of their boundaries. China will experience the largest increase in urban land near protected areas with 304 000 ± 33 000 km2 of new urban land to be developed within 50 km of protected area boundaries. The largest urban expansion in biodiversity hotspots, over 100 000 ± 25 000 km2, is forecasted to occur in South America. Uncertainties in the forecasts of the amount and location of urban land expansion reflect uncertainties in their underlying drivers including urban population and economic growth. The forecasts point to the need to reconcile urban development and biodiversity conservation strategies.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01203c733c0cd16c81d8dc614e4b284f3fbbd01b
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Citations in the corpus
- Projecting global urban land expansion and heat island intensification through 2050 (2019, methodology): “…land observation and preserving the Zipf’s law of urban size distribution (Gabaix 1999, Fragkias and Seto 2009) in the forecasts, we significantly modify a global urban land change model, URBANMOD (Seto et al 2012, Güneralp and Seto 2013), to develop a new forecast model, called URBANMOD-ZIPF.”
- A systematic map of research exploring the effect of greenspace on mental health (2020, background): “Results can highlight knowledge gaps and direct future research priorities, including primary and secondary research, synopses of evidence, systematics reviews, and meta-analyses (Haddaway et al., 2016; James et al., 2016).”
- Impact of urbanization on US surface climate (2015, background): “…land cover (LC) disturbance is reaching higher proportions in some regions of the world and may already be playing a role in local and regional scale biological, hydrological, energetic and socio-economic activities (e.g., Güneralp and Seto 2013, Mahmood et al 2014, McDonald et al 2014).”
- Dragonflies and damselflies (Odonata) in urban ecosystems: A review (2016, background): “Moreover, the estimated percentage of the world population living in urban areas now exceeds 50% (Grimm et al., 2008) and almost 60% will be living in urban areas by the year 2030 (Seto et al., 2012; Güneralp & Seto, 2013).”
- Future global urban water scarcity and potential solutions (2021, methodology): “Since the scenarios used in existing urban land forecasts are now dated 43,44 , we simulated the spatial distribution of global urban land in 2050 under each SSP at a grid-cell resolution of 1km 2 using the zoned Land Use Scenario Dynamics-urban (LUSD-urban) model 45 – 47 (Supplementary Methods 1).”