Abstract:Human survival and development in coastal cities rely on a range of ecosystem services provided by coastal ecosystem. With the rapid urbanization and the increased exploitation and development, coastal cities' ecosystems are under increasing pressure. Due to diverse natural and human pressure, many coastal cities are experiencing acute environmental problems, such as climate change, sea level rise, land use change, coastal erosion, pollution, degradation of dunes and saline intrusion to coastal aquifers and rivers. The coastal city's vulnerability to both human and natural influences is particularly challenging. Over the last decade, backed by multidisciplinary collaborations in sustainability sciences, many scholars have become increasingly aware of coastal vulnerability to global changes at all relevant scales. The presence of a perturbation or stress, sensitivity of the affected entity and the system's capacity to cope or respond (resilience) are major elements in vulnerability analysis of a coupled human-environment system. Sensitivity in this sense is defined as the interaction within the system, between the systems or inside the complex system used to characterize the response level the system according to changes in its internal or external factors.
Land use change is the embodiment of the process of global urbanization. Land use changes of coastal city impact the supply, demand and space allocation of the regional ecosystem services, and further make influences on the social industrial sectors depending on these ecosystem services. Taking Xiamen city for example, this paper identified the main ecosystem services that three coastal industrial sectors fishing sector, port and shipping sector, and coastal tourism sector depended on. Then the Sensitivity Index (SI) to land use changes of industrial sectors was constructed, which used the ratio of the variation of ecosystem service values to the variation of land use intensity to characterize industrial sector's sensitivity to land use changes. The results showed that the total ecosystem service values of fishing sector decreased from 1.526×109 Yuan in 1987 to 1.485×109 Yuan in 1992, and increased to 2.614×109 Yuan in 2002, then decreased to 1.113×109 Yuan in 2007. The total ecosystem service values of port and shipping sector went down from 2.138×109 Yuan in 1987 to 1.963×109 Yuan in 1992, then rose to 2.187×109 Yuan in 2002 and dropped to 1.854×109 Yuan in 2007. The total ecosystem service values of coastal tourism sector decreased from 2.056×109 Yuan in 1987 to 1.925×109 Yuan in 1997, then went up to 2.073×109 Yuan in 2002 and dropped slightly to 2.038×109 Yuan in 2007. Compared with the result of 1987, the SI of fishing sector in year 1992, 1997, 2002, 2007 were 0.377, 2.692, 7.815, 3.211 respectively, which showed an increase-drop trend. The SI of port and shipping sector in year 1992, 1997, 2002 and 2007 were 1.169, 0.474, 0.251, 1.578 respectively, which represented a drop-increase trend. The SI of coastal tourism sector in year 1992, 1997, 2002 and 2007 were 0.814, 0.743, 0.091, 0.101 respectively, which demonstrated a drop-increase trend. Based on the results, a discussion about the response mechanism of the industrial sector's sensitivity to land use changes was conducted. The study also presented a theoretical instruction for future research.