Abstract
Abstract. The China-Europe Railway Express (CER-Express), not only promoted the cooperation between countries and regions across Asia and Europe but also gave rise to remarkable changes in landcover and had a profound effect on the natural environment along the railway in recent years. Effective ways to monitor and assess ecological changes are urgently needed to ensure sustainable development of CER-Express. There are very few existing environmental monitoring studies focusing on the area along the CERExpress. In this paper, we present a study of environmental degradation, which occurred during the construction and operation of CER-Express from 2010 to 2018, based on a comprehensive evaluation index (CEI), which takes three environmental indicators into account and provides a timely and reliable evaluation of environmental changes at large scales. In addition, the environment conditions of the regions and countries along the CER-Express have been quantified and comparatively studied at different scales over different periods, using histograms of mean CEI values. Furthermore, specific causes of environmental degradation in the rail-intensive countries and small-area countries along the railway are discussed. Our results show that the environmental degradation can be detected in most of the rail-intensive countries, such as Germany, Poland, Austria, and Czech Republic along the railway. Therefore, to ensure sustainability of the CER-Express, environmental protection along the railway should be paid more attention to and a reasonable arrangement for the exploitation of CER-Express devised.
Highlights
The CER-Express is of great significance in promoting the trade between East and West, since it is strengthening the cooperation between countries along the railway
Since the Goal 15 was mentioned in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by United Nations (UN), many studies have explored the worldwide environmental issues involved in the sustainability of terrestrial ecosystems, desertification, and land degradation (Kavvada, Metternicht et al 2020), whereas very little research has been done on the topic along the China-Europe Railway Express (CER-Express)
To verify whether more significant environment degradation was present in the proximity of the railway, we further introduced region-wide mean comprehensive evaluation index (CEI) values of S3. the 30 kilometers buffer zone along the CER-Express within each country (Fig. 4), the values were compared to S1
Summary
The CER-Express is of great significance in promoting the trade between East and West, since it is strengthening the cooperation between countries along the railway. The multi-parameter correlation analysis method uses the socio-human development indicators and the ecological features, such as footprints, to evaluate the relationship between environmental changes and human activities (Fang, Wang et al 2020) (Mariano, Santos et al 2018) (Yang and Hu 2019). In this study we use long-term multi-source datasets and histograms of mean comprehensive evaluation index (CEI) value, at different analysis scales, to accurately assess the environmental conditions along the CER-Express and briefly analyze the reasons of environment degradation in different regions and countries occurring during its fast construction and since the
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