Cropland is the largest man-made landscape type in China, and cropland changes have a complex linkage not only to climate change and other natural conditions but also to anthropogenic activities, especially government policies and socioeconomic factors. Improving the understanding of cropland change and its driving factors is a current focus for policy decision-makers in China.

The cropland is very sensitive to climate change and human activities in northern China, where the ecological environment is extraordinarily fragile. Previous studies have given few descriptions of the contributions of climate change and human activities to cropland change patterns in different time periods.

Based on the datasets of cropland and cropland changes from the 1970s to the 2000s and two representative indicators of heat and water resources, Dr. SHI Wenjiao, Prof. TAO Fulu and Prof. LIU Jiyuan et al. from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGSNRR, CAS) found that climate warming has provided thermal conditions that have aided rapid cropland reclamation in northern China since the 1970s, and drier climatic conditions did not become a limiting factor for cropland reclamation, especially from the 1990s to the 2000s. Approximately 40 % of cropland abandonment occurred in warmer and wetter conditions that were suitable for agriculture during the periods from the 1970s to the 1980s and the 1990s to the 2000s, which suggests that there were other non-climate factors that influenced cropland conversions in northern China.

This research suggested that climate change can be considered a driving factor of cropland change in the past several decades in northern China, in addition to socioeconomic factors.

This study was supported by the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Program on Key Basic Research Project of China, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

The study has been published in Climatic Change (Wenjiao Shi, Fulu Tao, Jiyuan Liu, Xinliang Xu, Wenhui Kuang, Jinwei Dong, Xiaoli Shi. Has Climate Change Driven Spatio-temporal Changes of Cropland in Northern China since the 1970s? Climatic Change, 2014, 124(1-2): 163-177. doi:10.1007/s10584-014-1088-1).