Maximize Eco-Economic Benefits with Minimum Land Resources Input: Evaluation and Evolution of Land Use Eco-Efficiency of Agglomerations in Middle Reaches of Yangtze River, China

Increasing land-use eco-efficiency can alleviate human-land conflict in urban areas as well as improve regional urbanization quality to achieve sustainable development. As the central urban agglomeration in China, the Middle Reaches of Yangtze River (MRYR) has experienced rapid urbanization and huge land-use change during 2000 to 2020, which poses great threats to its ecological environment. This study adopted the Super-Slack-Based Data Envelopment Analysis (Super SBM-DEA) model to evaluate the eco-efficiency of land use in MRYR. The result shows that the average eco-efficiency value of land use is above 0.77 for each year, indicating that the general efficiency is at a middle level. The trend of the evolution of the eco-efficiency can be summarized as a “U-shape” style curve. The variance between the four urban agglomerations of the MRYR changed over time. Not all capital cities or cities with higher GDP per capita obtain higher eco-efficiency in this study. Policy intervention, population and land use, technique, and environmental pollution are influencing factors of land-use eco-efficiency. Based on slacks analysis, this study proposed the optimization of the land-use structure to improve eco-efficiency from four aspects of land-use structure, investment and labor, ecosystem services value (ESV) and environment pollution, and industry structure.