Study on the Current Status and Governance Approaches for Regional Cultivated Land Protection within the Context of Territorial Spatial Planning

The comprehensive restructuring of China's territorial spatial planning system has fundamentally transformed the pattern of territorial space development and protection; the rigid demarcation of the "Three Zones and Three Lines" provides an institutional framework for the integrated protection of cultivated land in terms of quantity, quality, and ecology, while also imposing new requirements for the refined governance of cultivated land at the regional level. To explore the practical challenges and optimization pathways for cultivated land protection at the county level in the current era, this paper selects typical counties as research areas and employs a combination of literature review, current status analysis, and comparative analysis to systematically examine the land use structure of the study area, the patterns of dynamic changes in land use over the past five years, and existing measures for cultivated land protection and management. The study reveals that during the urbanization process in these regions, several issues persist, including the continuous expansion of construction land, a slight reduction in total cultivated land area, increasing fragmentation of land parcels, relatively low levels of intensive land use, prominent risks of non-agricultural or non-grain utilization of cultivated land, and imperfect spatial control and inter-departmental coordination mechanisms; furthermore, the conflict between population and land resources continues to intensify. Against the backdrop of rigid constraints imposed by territorial spatial planning, cultivated land protection is no longer limited to mere quantitative control but requires a systemic approach that integrates spatial layout optimization, revitalization of existing land resources, quality enhancement, and ecological restoration. Based on these findings, this paper proposes governance pathways focusing on optimizing the spatial structure of land use, improving the efficiency of intensive land use, strictly controlling the conversion of cultivated land to other uses, strengthening the overall regulatory mechanism, and enhancing ecological restoration of cultivated land, with the aim of providing theoretical references and practical insights for cultivated land protection and high-quality territorial spatial governance in similar regions.