A study of land reclamation and ecological restoration in a resource-exhausted city – a case study of Huaibei in China

Abstract Eco-city construction is a powerful method which can advance a city from traditional industrial civilisation to ecological civilisation. The city of Huaibei, with 50 years of coal mining history, has been listed as a national resource-exhausted city. The city's sustainable development and ecological restoration work face severe challenges. This study presents a time-space evolution analysis of mining subsidence to show the evolution and the distribution of the subsidence area in Huaibei. Intensive use was made of land evaluation to formulate land use measures. According to this analysis, and based on the popular eco-reconstruction movement, suggestions for land reclamation and eco-reconstruction are proposed for the city of Huaibei. The paper aims to make strategic recommendations to help Huaibei city transform from a resource-exhausted city to an eco-city. Keywords: resource-exhausted cityecological restorationHuaibei city Acknowledgements The research was supported by nonprofit industry research and special funds provided by the Ministry of Land and Resources in China, approval no. 200911015-03. We offer special thanks to Ru-Song Wang, a researcher at the Ecological Environment Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the valuable assistance provided, and to Dan Hu, a researcher at the State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology. We have also been helped by Fang Wang, from the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, and Robert Edson Swain from Williams Huiming Architects. We also thank the Huaibei government for providing the research funding and other assistance.