Abstract: Scenario simulation of land-use and land-cover change is gaining importance in global change research and for sustainable use of land resources.Most of the existing research has focused on simulating and identifying the possible land use allocation in the future.How to represent historic land use change under different scenarios is an issue for assessing the relative effect of implemented policies.An innovative counterfactual simulation model was proposed for assessing the effects of China’s farmland protection policies on food security and urban sprawl.The CLUE-s model and GM(1,1) approach were combined to forecast land use changes and simulate their spatial locations in a study area.Jiayu County was taken as an example to test the validity of the proposed model.The results showed that farmland protection policies played an effective role in reducing the rate of cultivated land loss,restricting the expansion of disorderly construction and optimizing the spatial distribution of land-use allocations in Jiayu County.