区域发展地学基础综合研究的意义、进展与任务

区域发展问题是一个重大的地学问题。由于背景和驱动力的变化，我国的区域发展正面临着一系列复杂问题；解决这些问题很大程度上依赖于对我国区域发展"地学基础"的深刻认识和研究。这种研究不但具有重大实际意义，也是发展地理科学和深化地球表层系统研究的重要途径。论述了区域发展地学基础综合研究的意义，回顾和评价了国内外在此领域内的研究进展，提出研究的目标和任务。国内外近年来的研究表明，人文与自然要素的交叉和综合研究正在成为区域发展研究的前沿领域。我国在影响区域发展的单要素和多要素研究上取得了丰富的积累，而且地球表层系统中"人地关系"综合研究思想也已经兴起了10多年，但真正的交叉和综合研究还很少。进行我国区域发展地学基础综合研究的目标是阐明我国自然和人文要素的区域分异特征及其与区域发展分异之间的耦合关系，揭示地学因素在各时期影响我国区域发展的综合作用机制。

THE SIGNIFICANCE, PROGRESS AND FUTURE TASKS OF AN INTEGRATED STUDY OF GEO-DYNAMICS BEHIND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The grave issues related to global change and sustainable development have been drawing attention from scholars in the field of regional studies. It is now widely recognized that regional development is the result of handful factors and cannot be well explained solely by socio-economic factors. Among the other factors, geo-factors have played an important role while their role was underplayed in the past when determinism was totally rejected. From the perspective of human-nature relationship, the geo-factors that effect regional development can be understood as the part of nature in such a relationship and the spatial structure resulted from the interaction between human activities and the nature. At least, they include natural conditions, endowment of nature resources, location, ecological environment, and infrastructures. As such, itis essential to study the dynamics behind the impacts of these geo-factors on regional development and to reveal the ways of regulating socio-economic development based on such dynamics. In China, as a result of changes in driving forces, regional development are facing a number of new problems that are closely related to physical environment. Thus, it is also practically meaningful to undertake such an integrated study. 
The authors of this paper first spell out the significance of an integrated study of the geo-dynamics behind regional development, then examine the progress in related studies both in China and in selected foreign countries, and lastly point out the target and tasks of integrated regional studies. They argue that interdisciplinary studies that involve both physical and human factors are coming to the fore in regional studies. In China, the impacts of single geo-factor on regional development have been studied for many years and are now understood quite well, and the notion of human-nature relationship in the study of earth surface has been resumed for more than ten years. However,realinterdisciplinary studies have yet seldom been seen. The authors suggest that the target of integrated regional studies in China be to summarize the impacts of geo-factors on regional development at different stages of development, elaborate the coupling relationship between regional differentiations of physical and human factors, and reveal the dynamic process of the impacts of geo-factors on regional development in relation to the stage of development. Under such a target, future tasks of integrated regional studies include: (1) to examine the interaction between regional development and environmental change and understand the scientific foundation of regional sustainable development of China, (2) to study strategies for long-term economic growth and orientations of restructuring, which are coordinated with environmental protection and reasonable exploitation of natural resources, (3) to analyze the extent of security of natural resources and elasticity of ecological system of different regions as well as carrying capacity of the system of environment and natural resources of these regions and (4) to propose potentialmodes of sustainable development.