The impact of climate and land-use change on ecosystem services in the Pearl River Delta area of China

In the context of global climate change and intensifying human activities, effective management of urban ecosystem services (ESs) is crucial for achieving sustainable development goals. Urbanization-induced land use change and climate change are two primary drivers altering UESs. However, previous studies have predominantly focused on historical urban expansion and climate change effects on UESs, leaving future evolution scenarios and their relative impacts underexplored. This study investigates the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration as a case study area, examining the relative impacts of land use and climate change on five UESs: water yield (WY), soil conservation (SC), water purification (WP), urban flood risk mitigation (FM), and urban cooling (UC). The results revealed that all five ecosystem services exhibited high values in the peri-urban areas and low values in the urban core of the Pearl River Delta. WY, FM, and UC showed an overall increasing trend, while SC and WP exhibited fluctuating trends from 1990 to 2050. Changes in SC were predominantly influenced by climate change, accounting for 76.24% of the total area, whereas WY, WP, FM, and UC services were primarily affected by land use change, accounting for over 67.16% of the area. In the future scenarios of 2035 and 2050, the impact of climate change on soil conservation varied the most across different Shared Socio-economic Pathway (SSP) scenarios. The impact of land use change on WY, WP, FM, and UC exhibited the most significant differences across urban areas, indicating a high sensitivity of urbanization-induced ecosystem services to human disturbances.