Quantitatively Determining the Priorities of Regional Ecological Compensation for Cultivated Land in Different Main Functional Areas: A Case Study of Hubei Province, China

With the rapid economic growth and urbanisation process, a large amount of cultivated land has been permanently transformed into urban land. The protection of cultivated land has received widespread attention, and ecological compensation has been an effective means of restraining the decrease in cultivated land. Different from previous approaches to and methods of studying cultivated land’s ecological compensation, this study proposes a new behavioural perspective. Reasonably determining the priority of ecological compensation and the amount of compensation constitutes the core of building a regional ecological compensation mechanism. On the basis of the main functional area, this paper defines the area of ecological compensation and payment for cultivated land and determines the corresponding order and level by measuring the ecosystem’s service value in Hubei Province. The results show that the order and quantity of ecological compensation for cultivated land are spatially heterogeneous, and that the order and quantity of compensation (payment) in different main functional areas have a certain correlation. That is, when the order of compensation (payment) is higher, the quantity is larger. The results have a certain reference value for the reform of cultivated land’s ecological compensation and the innovation of financial payment mechanisms, particularly in the context of developing countries.