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.