Rural China's Unsustainable Ecological Decline
The agricultural development of the Lower Yangtze River Basin around Nanjing and Shanghai is ecologically unsustainable and actions are needed soon to reverse its decline, according to a new study.The region has been in environmental decline since it passed a tipping point in the late 1970s, which further found that:* the relatively stable pre-1970s 'agriculture-ecology' system in the region reached a tipping point at the end of the 1970s, as reforms in China allowed farmers to grow surplus crops with more fertilizers and pesticides.* economic development has created a 'trade-off' between gains in agricultural productivity and increasing environmental degradation, with losses of ecosystem services, such as good water quality and stable soils. read more