Assessment of coastal development policy based on simulating a sustainable land‐use scenario for L iaoning C oastal Z one in C hina

Unsustainable land development policy can result in serious eco‐environmental issues, leading to unsustainable development in coastal zones, the phenomenon of which is particularly prominent in developing countries. How to assess the impact of policy on the sustainable development of land resource in the future is a challenge that is well worth exploring. With the coastal zone of Liaoning Province in China as an example, this paper proposes a new framework for assessing coastal development policy based on simulating the sustainable land‐use scenario (S). The results show that under Scenario D that driven by government's development policies, the proportions of highly exploited construction land and shoreline would be 11 and 18 percentage points higher, respectively, than those under Scenario S, whereas the potential losses of agricultural land and natural land in Scenario S would increase by 14.5% and 12.6%, respectively, the natural shoreline would decrease by 25.1% in comparison with Scenario S. Policy‐led deviation indexes in industrial, urban, and port land use are 12.98, 7.15, and 2.02, respectively, on the contrary in natural land use, it even reaches a high level of −15.07. This indicates that, being driven by the government development policies, the development scales of industrial, urban, and port land/shoreline use significantly will exceed the corresponding sustainably healthy ranges, leading to a massive diversion of natural land/shoreline, which thereby becomes the type most remarkably impacted by policy errors. The findings can provide case‐study analysis and reference for assessing the impact of development policy on resource‐environment sustainability.