Statistical Analysis of Land-use Change and Driving Forces in the Kansai District, Japan

Hoshino, S. (1996). Statistical Analysis of Land-use Change and Driving Forces in the Kansai District, Japan. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-96-120

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Abstract

The current state of land use is the result of a variety of factors, caused by both biophysical and socio-economic conditions, and their interactions. Land-use features prominently in many disciplines such as geography, economics, civil engineering, architecture, city and rural planning, soil science, forest management, and so on. But the study of land-use is often limited to only one discipline. There are only a few studies where the influence of both natural and socio-economic factors on land-use is simultaneously investigated. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the relations among land use, socio-economic variables and geophysical factors in the case study area of Kansai district, Japan. This region contains the second largest urbanized area in Japan (after the Tokyo metropolitan area), while maintaining significant paddy rice cultivation in the suburban surroundings. Here we seek to extract the crucial relationships between land use in the Kansai district and the associated factors with statistical techniques.

In general, land-use change can be separated into two levels. "Minor land-use change" is land-use change within the same economic sector. "Major land-use change" means land-use conversion from one major industry to another [Black, 1931; Wada, 1980]. For example, according to this classification, a crop change in agriculture is a minor land-use change, and land-use conversion from farmland to residential land is a major land-use change.

In this study, we focus mainly on major land-use change. A first reason is that land-use conversion usually brings about permanent change. Conversion to residential land from any other land-use, and even conversion from farmland to forest land are actually irreversible processes. The second reason is a practical one, since it is difficult to obtain the detailed land-use data that are prerequisites for within category land-use analysis.

In this paper, we first present some basic information on the case study area, describe the characteristics of the local agriculture and briefly discuss the statistical data used in the case study. The subsequent analysis consists of two parts: an analysis of the distribution of land uses and an analysis of the driving forces of land-use change.

The distribution of land use is represented by percentage of total area. We calculate the static relationships between the distribution of land uses and socio-economic and geophysical factors. We then try to elucidate whether the static relations are temporally stable, i.e. how these relationships have changed during the study period from 1970 to 1990.

For farmland and residential land we investigate what kind of socio-economic factors as well as natural conditions explain the temporal changes of these major land-use categories during the study period. Through these analyses, we extract some driving forces of land-use change in the study area.

The data set for this study was originally developed in the project "Land-use and Global Environment Change" (LU/GEC, 1995) sponsored by the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan.

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