# Does Intensive Land Use Contribute to Energy Efficiency?--Evidence Based on a Spatial Durbin Model
###### Abstract  
In order to ensure the safety of cultivated land and promote urban productivity, the Chinese government began to promote intensive land use at the legislative level from 2014. At the same time, China faces problems of carbon emissions and energy, so we need to improve energy efficiency. Therefore, this paper aims to verify the spatial effects of intensive land use on energy efficiency of China from 2009 to 2018. We further use an index system to quantify intensive land use and use chain DEA (data envelope analysis) to quantify energy efficiency. This paper finds that: (1) intensive land use can significantly improve energy efficiency. A 1% increase in the level of intensive land use will increase energy efficiency by 1.3%. (2) The intensive use of land in one city will have a negative impact on the energy efficiency of surrounding cities. The reason is that the intensive use of land in a single city may lead to the transfer of energy-consuming industries to surrounding cities. (3) The impact of intensive land use on the energy efficiency of surrounding cities has negative threshold characteristics, and the negative impact will be weakened as the level of integration of the city increases. intensive land use; spatial durbin model; energy efficiency; carbon emissions +
Footnote †: journal: Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health  
economic development is still in the stage of stock accumulation, and it still needs to rely on capital stock driven by production investment and infrastructure investment, which, in turn, leads to carbon emissions; energy resource endowments are not abundant enough, and it is difficult to build a diversified and green energy structure. Raising awareness of environmental protection, encouraging green consumption, raising the level of green technology innovation and improving energy efficiency are all ways to mitigate the growth of carbon emissions. Among them, energy efficiency refers to obtaining a higher output under the same energy input, so the improvement of energy efficiency can effectively save the total energy use, thereby reducing related carbon emissions [4]. Improving energy efficiency means that comprehensive innovation and exploration are required to promote a new round of industrial energy revolution. Improving energy efficiency also requires substantial improvements in existing energy production and consumption methods. It is then conducive to promoting new industries, creating new growth points, and realizing a low-carbon transformation of economic development in the process. Human economic activities use land as the primary bearing space, and a large amount of agricultural land is gradually transformed into non-agricultural land, which has gradually become one of the main factors for the rapid rise of carbon dioxide emissions. Additionally, the change of land use is the second most significant factor behind the increase in global atmospheric carbon dioxide content after the burning of fossil fuels [5]. The main reason is that the intensive use of land is through the increase in labor, capital, technology and other inputs to achieve a high-efficiency use of resources and achieve economic development, while also inevitably increasing the total amount of carbon emissions. In addition, China's increasingly limited land resources have increasingly restricted the direction and speed of urban development and have threatened food security and ecological security. When the cultivation process of the introduced planted food species is complex, the requirements for the living environment are relatively high, so a large amount of land is needed as a test field. At the same time, the development of the renewable green low-carbon energy industry requires large-scale engineering construction as a platform to support it, so it can be widely promoted and applied [6].