Bay areas are endowed with unique sea and land resources, location advantages, and high environmental carrying capacities. The rapid urbanization process has intensified the demand for limited natural resources, leading to a series of problems in coastal zones such as land use conflicts and the degradation of ecosystem services. Taking Quanzhou, a bay city in a metropolitan region, as an example, this paper established an accounting model of ecosystem services supply and consumption demand based on multisource data (meteorological site data, land use data and statistical data).

As land is limited, conflicts between land uses, and, consequently, conflicts between land users about land use inevitably arise. However, how these land use conflicts affect local land use actors has remained underexplored. The objective of this paper is to provide a broad, cross-sectoral overview of land use conflicts as perceived by local land use actors and to explore the actors’ experiences with these conflicts.

The current supply method of land acquisition for mining land in China is not conducive to the sustainable use of land resources, resulting in a large amount of wasted land resources and causing many conflicts. The new model of temporary land use policy for mining solves the long-standing problem of the livelihood of expropriated farmers that has plagued local governments, and also helps to alleviate the conflicts between enterprises and farmers. However, the temporary land use policy is in the practice stage, and the policy failure has resulted in low land reclamation rates.