Unequal impacts of global urban-rural settlement construction on cropland and production over the past three decades.

The world has experienced a rapid expansion of human settlements in both urban and rural areas in recent decades, yet the unequal impacts of this construction on global food security remain unclear. In this study, we delineated the global-scale expansion of urban-rural settlements at a fine resolution from 1985 to 2020 and quantified their uneven impacts on food security, focusing on the relationships between settlement types, cropland categories, and disparities in crop production. Our results showed that despite dramatic urbanization, rural settlements still constituted the majority of human settlement areas in 2020. Globally, cropland loss due to the expansion of rural settlements was 1.2 times greater than that caused by urbanization, while the associated yield loss was 1.5 times higher. Notably, urban-rural settlement expansion in Asia accounted for 61% of cropland loss and 64% of yield loss. Moreover, future scenarios predicted that Asia's urban-rural settlement expansion will continue to have the most significant impacts on the loss of cropland and yield throughout the 2030s. These results provide systematic evidence of the unequal impacts of urban-rural settlement construction on global cropland and food security.