Carbon emission and economic development trade-offs for optimizing land-use allocation in the Yangtze River Delta, China

Reconciling carbon emissions and GDP development is a challenge for most Chinese cities in the sustainable development process. Taking the Yangtze River Delta of China as an example, this study calculated carbon-emission inventories for five typical years and assigned anthropogenic carbon emissions to land-use types. A multi-objective particle swarm algorithm was used to consider three functions of land-use allocation: maximizing GDP, minimizing carbon emissions, and maximizing suitability. Thereafter, the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) method was combined to find the optimal solution for carbon emission and economic development trade-offs. It is observed that Jiangsu has the largest carbon emissions in the Yangtze River Delta region; energy consumption is the main source of the carbon emissions, and industrial land is the most carbon intensive region. The land-use allocation obtained by multi-objective optimization with the TOPSIS evaluation method increases GDP and reduces carbon emissions, which is worthy of reference for land planners. Land use optimization from the perspective of balancing carbon emissions and economic development can provide a useful reference for the rational use of land resources and socio-economic sustainable development.