Spatio-temporal dynamics of China’s ecological civilization progress after implementing national conservation strategy

Abstract In 2012, the Communist Party of China developed the first “ecological civilization construction” national strategy, with a special focus on ecosystem environments and natural resources. The aim of this strategy is to manage ecology, environmental challenges, and resource depletion occurring under rapid economic development. However, research has not been conducted to assess the progress of ecological civilization after the implementation of this national strategy across China’s provinces and over time, and the comparison in ecological civilization progress before and after the implementation of the national strategy is still unknown. This information is critically important as it can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the national strategy and provide useful guidelines for future policy-making to better manage national ecology and environment. To address this knowledge gap, we assessed ecological civilization progress across China’s provinces in 2012–2017 and 2007–2012. Comprehensive assessments were based on a synthetical weight-based index consisting of 33 indicators that focus on ecosystem conservation, environmental quality improvement, and rational utilization of resource. The results demonstrated that at a national level, the general progress rate of ecological civilization reached 14.94% in 2012–2017, which was 2.3 times of the levels recorded in 2007–2012. Unexpectedly, the growth rate of progress in the most important dimension—ecosystem conservation (7.54%)—was far lower than that of environmental quality improvement (19.46%) and rational utilization of resource progress (17.11%). Moreover, large variations existed among ecological civilization progress across provinces. After the implementation of the ECC strategy, developing provinces made more improvement in ecological civilization progress than developed provinces. The results of our study demonstrate the improvement in progress of China’s ecological civilization construction and indicate that ecosystem conservation should be further highlighted for ecological civilization development policy.