China is facing huge environmental problems with its current rapid rate of urbanization and industrialization, thus causing biodiversity loss, ecosystem service degradation on a major scale. Against this background, three previous examples (the nature reserve policy, the afforestation policy, and the zoning policy) are implemented in China. These all play important roles in protecting natural ecosystems, although they can sometimes cause new problems and lack rigorous targets for environmental outcomes. To overcome the current management conflicts, China has proposed a new “ecological protection redline” policy (EPR). EPR can be defined as the ecological baseline area needed to provide ecosystem services to guarantee and maintain ecological safety. In this paper, we proposed ideas and measures of EPR delineation, compared the ecological protection systems and their management practice executed by other foreign countries. We also present specific management measures according to EPR classifications.
Results/Conclusions
We concluded three kinds of redlines in China, including key ecological function area redlines, ecological sensitive or fragile areas redlines, and forbidden development areas redlines. For the key ecological function area redlines, a total of 38 water conservation functional zones have been designated, covering a total area of 3.23 million km2; 14 soil conservation zones have been designated, covering a total area of 881700 km2; wind-prevention and sand-fixation zones across the country cover a total area of about 1.73 million km2, accounting for 57.13% of the total land area of the whole country. With respect to the ecologically vulnerable redlines, 18 ecologically vulnerable zones has been designated across the country, covering 2.19 million km2, accounting for 22.86% of the total land area of the whole country. Forbidden development areas redlines covered a total area of 3.29 million km2, accounting for 34.3% of the total land area of the whole country. We advocated a strict EPR regulatory strategy, including ecological compensation system, the negative listing system for ecological environment protection, performance appraisal system and monitoring platform system. This research can help to strengthen ecological protection regulatory system, and optimize national spatial development pattern in China.