The intensifying conflict between urban–rural development and the natural environment under rapid industrialization and urbanization underscores the necessity to balance ecological preservation with economic growth for sustainable land use. Grounded in the Production–Living–Ecological Space (PLES) theory, this study classifies land use into production, living and ecological functional types to set three scenarios (natural development, production–living priority, ecological priority), and employs the PLUS model with a land use conversion cost matrix and spatial driving factors as input variables to simulate land use changes and their ecological impacts. Analysis of the period 2010–2020 reveals an initial decline followed by a recovery in ecological quality, highlighting the urgency of improved spatial planning. Projections for 2025–2035 based on the PLES theory reveal divergent trajectories across three scenarios simulated by the PLUS model, whereas the production–living priority scenario accelerates urban–industrial expansion and exacerbates environmental degradation by driving irrational land use conversion. In contrast, the ecological priority scenario significantly enhances ecological and environmental quality while minimizing the loss of agricultural land, achieving a more sustainable balance between development and conservation. Through quantitative calculation of the ecological contribution rate of land use transitions, the internal conversion of agricultural production space contributes the most to regional ecological quality improvement (42.50% in 2025–2030 in the ecological priority scenario), and forest PLES land use category has the highest ecological environment index (0.2836 in 2025) among all PLES types, emphasizing the pivotal role of agricultural production space and the high ecological value of forestland in regional ecosystems. These findings demonstrate that prioritizing ecological strategies is essential for realizing a win–win outcome between ecological protection and economic development, offering actionable insights for sustainable land use planning in ecologically fragile transition zones similar to the Southern Taihang region.
Li et al. (Fri,) studied this question.