Ecological Indicators (Oct 2023)
Ecological security assessment of China based on the Pressure-State-Response framework
Abstract
As the largest developing country and a country facing enormous pollution pressure, China's ecosystem has been the object of wide concern among researchers. As governments around the world accelerate the process of ecological protection, assessing the state of regional ecological security is extremely important for the formulation of ecological protection policies. However, previous studies on ecological security assessment in China have often assessed the ecosystem in a small area only and have not carried out an overall review of China's environmental security. Therefore, it is urgent to establish a comprehensive index system to assess the ecological security status of China. Based on the Pressure-State-Response framework, this study constructs an assessment index system. Taking the 31 provinces in China as the research objects, this study combines China's yearbook data and the entropy method to calculate an ecological security index for China. Then, this study combines analyzes the ecological security index in a temporal and spatial scale. The study found that from 2009 to 2018, China's ecological security index showed an approximately “U”-shaped change trend. Specifically, in 2009, China's ESI was 0.52, which was classified as Ordinary status. By 2014, China's ESI had dropped to its lowest value in 2010–2019, at 0.35, in a relatively weak state. However, from 2015 onwards, China's ESI began to rise steadily, reaching 0.56 in 2018, which was considered an ordinary state. Among the assessment indices, the pressure index was the highest, and the status index was the lowest. The index system constructed based on the PSR framework makes the assessment tool of this study more systematic and scientific, and the ecological security index calculated using the entropy weighting method comprehensively reflects the ecological status of China and more accurately identifies the ecological problems of each region in China.
