Enhancing China's ecological sustainability through more optimized investment

Abstract

China has tremendously invested in a set of ecological sustainability programs since the late 1970 s. Although the positive ecological benefits for human well-being have dramatically increased, these large-scale investments are still confronted with some drawbacks and lack a more comprehensive and precise understanding. Here, we quantitatively presented an overall portrait of spatial distribution, temporal trends and inter-annual variations of ecological investments for ten representative programs in the period 1978–2018 from national to provincial levels. Overall, the Chinese government has invested US$197.59 billion (in 2015 US$) for all the programs in total with the top three amounts in Southwest China, North China and Northwest China. We found that the investments for all the programs had gone through a rapid increase since 2000 with a much faster growth rate in Central China and East China. At the national level, the investments of ecological sustainability programs showed good stability and continuity. However, their annual investments varied greatly among different provinces. For instance, the Shelterbelt Development Program in Five Regions including the Middle and Lower Reaches of the Yangtze River coastal areas was interrupted for more than ten years and showed weak stability in some specific provinces. It is suggested that China should adopt more optimized investment strategies in terms of distribution, stability and continuity through augmenting government funds and diversifying financial pathways for the ecological sustainability programs.