The establishment of Chinese ecological conservation redline and insights into improving international protected areas

Ecological redlines provide a mechanism to maximize conservation gains in Mainland Southeast Asia

“…The assessment results under this comprehensive index expand the scope of existing PA planning and help to increase the connectivity of the ecosystem by reducing redundancy, and ensuring effective regional prioritization for not only biodiversity but also environmental services. 34 Such an approach has already been initiated in China through integrating the former green (forest) and blue (water) lines to provide an integrated approach to conservation as a basis for ECR, 14 and more than one-fourth of China's territory has been included in ERAs. 15 ECR is no longer simply a macro-strategic approach, but a specific, measurable, aspirational, realistic, and time-bound systematic approach that can be incorporated effectively into ecological protection and land planning within and beyond China.…”

“…Ecological redline policy is a comprehensive approach implemented by China to safeguard biodiversity and natural resources based on a number of different provisions, with the ecological conservation redline (ECR) forming a major component. ECR integrates ecosystem service provision, ecological sensitivity, and biodiversity priorities into a conservation and management framework, thereby enabling an effective and dynamic approach for developing targets within the landscape context 14 to achieve the goal of ''ecological civilization'' and enable human needs to be met while maintaining healthy natural systems. The inclusion of these other elements of ecosystem service provision and fragility takes these redlines beyond simply maintaining biodiversity and carbon, to a more holistic approach that maintains intact functional ecosystems and the services they provide.…”

“…16 This underscores the need for an overarching approach to proactively identify key regions for biodiversity to target protection. When compared with the existing PA system (without ERA basis), ECR also focuses on the integrity of ecological function and service, and aims to overcome the shortfalls of existing PA policy 14 as demonstrated by:…”

Practical Exploration of Ecological Restoration and Management of the Mountains-Rivers-Forests-Farmlands-Lakes-Grasslands System in the Irtysh River Basin in Altay, Xinjiang

“…High-intensity resource development has led to a series of serious ecological problems (e.g., environmental pollution, land degradation and biodiversity loss) (Liu and Diamond, 2005;Zhou et al, 2021), and the carrying capacity of resources and the environment continues to decline (Li et al, 2019a). To cope with the issue of increasingly severe ecological degradation, China has successively deployed and implemented a series of ecological restoration projects in areas with more serious ecological degradation (Shao et al, 2017;You et al, 2017;Gao et al, 2020). Though these projects have achieved certain results, most of them focus on individual ecological elements (e.g., water and soil), or only one single natural process (e.g., soil erosion) (Xu et al, 2014;Cheng and You, 2019;Peng et al, 2019).…”

Reoccupying Ecological Land for Excessively Expanded Rust Belt Cities in Traditional Grain Bases: An Eco-Economic Trade-Off Perspective

“…In addition, studies related to the optimal allocation of ecological land have mostly focused on solving regional environmental problems, and it has been verified that the rational planning of ecological land could be a useful way to improve social benefits and living satisfaction [12,[21][22][23][24]. At present, such studies and policies integrated with bottom line thinking have been gradually enriched, that is, to guarantee the core ecological functions by determining the minimum ecological land demand, which has risen to a national strategic level [25,26]. However, as a complex eco-economic system coupling the natural eco-environmental system and the socio-economic system, ecological land use should not only aim at maintaining ecological stability but also seek harmonious development with the economic system.…”