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The rapid urbanization and industrialization have caused excessive utilization of natural resources, which seriously threatened food security and ecological security in the world. Improving agricultural eco-efficiency (AEE) to obtain greater agricultural output at a lower environmental consume, is an significant part of agricultural sustainable development. However, the existing studies ignore agricultural carbon absorption when measuring the AEE, which leads to evaluating results distortive to some extent. Additionally, few research focuses on this topic within the rapid urbanized areas where the population, land and agricultural industry have undergone great changes. Thus, this study attempts to take the Urban Agglomeration in the Middle Reaches of Yangtze River (UAMRYR) in China as a case study and customize a new measurement system of AEE. The super slack-based measure (Super-SBM) model and Tobit model were applied to evaluate AEE and analyze the attribution of its spatiotemporal changes at the county level during 2000–2018. The results show that the average AEE value of the UAMRYR decreased from 0.534 in 2000 to 0.490 in 2005, and then showed an increasing trend to 0.677 in 2018. The spatiotemporal pattern revealed that the number of counties with high and medium–high AEE was increasing, while the number of counties with medium–low and low AEE continued to decrease from 2000 to 2018. Furthermore, there was a positive spatial correlation of AEE during the study period. The magnitude and direction of attribution in changes of AEE indicates that socioeconomic development, undesirable inputs reducing, the tolerance of crops to harsh environment improving, and investment in agricultural science and technology increasing could effectively improve the AEE. These findings have important implications for promoting agriculture highly-efficient utilization and sustainable development in China as well as other regions or countries with rapid urbanization in the world.
Yang et al. (Sat,) studied this question.