Abstract

One of the Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals（SDGs）of the“2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”is to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss（Goal 15）. This indicates that the future global sustainable development will be a development strategy based on the terrestrial ecosystem protection and will be a more lasting sustainable development strategy.

This book is aimed at: a）revealing the features of terrestrial ecosystem changes of China over the past decades, through the quantitative methods characterizing the terrestrial ecosystem changes and the current situation; b）providing reference for the global terrestrial ecosystem protection and realization of the goals stated in the“2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”, through summarizing and commenting on the policies and initiatives of terrestrial ecosystem protection in China. At the same time, the book is intended to provide international comparable analysis based on data availability.

This book is developed as follows. First, this book provides an over view of the basic characteristic and challenges of the forest ecosystem, grassland ecosystem, land desertification, wetland ecosystem and biodiversity conservation inside terrestrial ecosystem, summarizing the sustainable development concept and the evolution of goals based on the construction of terrestrial ecosystem protection, with a special focus on the initiation and progress on the ecosystem management in sustainable development. Second, based on the key indicator criteria from“the Agenda”on the terrestrial ecosystem protection, this book analyzes the framework, the current situation and the implemented sustainable practices through the two main lines and performs international comparison on part of the indicators. Specifically, the key indictors include forest coverage, integrated grassland coverage and grass production, desertification and change of desert area, change of wetland area and wetland rate, the number and area of nature reserves and national parks; the data sources include previous forest resource inventory data, grassland monitoring report data, land desertification monitoring data, wetland survey data, secondary data on national natural reserves research, and relevant data from China Statistical Yearbook over the years; the two main lines refer to: firstly the changes of forest ecosystems, grassland ecosystems, land desertification, wetland ecosystems, natural reserves and biodiversity and secondly the policy, project and actions of sustainable management in various terrestrial ecosystems.

This book is organized as such 7 chapters: a）Overview; b）Protection and sustainable management of the forest ecosystem; c）Protection and sustainable management of the grassland ecosystem; d）Current situa tion and sustainable management of land desertification in China; e）Protection and sustainable management of wetland ecosystems; f）Protection and sustainable management of biodiversity; g）Main conclusions and prospects. The main findings and conclusions are as follows：

First, the properties of forest coverage in China are: a）From year 1984 to 2014, the forest coverage have been increasing successively, owing majorly to the sustainable management policies and projects implemented during the period, which can provide important reference to reverse the current situation of declining forest coverage in developing countries and regions. b）There is still huge challenge of decline of forest coverage over the globe. c）Of the country and regions in“the Belt and Road”, the proportion of low forest coverage is relatively high due to the high proportion of countries and regions in arid desert areas. d）For the developed economies in the world, the overall forest coverages are stable.

Second, the correlations of forest coverage and its growth rate are generally negative in China. That is, the growth rates are higher in the provinces with lower forest coverages, which means that the fundamental constraint of forest coverage is the regional resource endowment and the most important indicator criteria should be based on the changing trend and not on comparing the absolute value. When the forest coverage matches with natural resource endowment, the policy goal of sustainable management is the stability of forest coverage, not the long term growth, indicating that the forest coverage in China will tend to be stable in the future.

Third, China has developed protection and restoration projects on grassland ecosystem, which has significant effect on improving the quality of grassland ecosystem. Yet there are still challenges in the protection and sustainable management of grassland ecosystem, the hardest of which is the balance of grassland and livestock. Because grassland productivity changes with the change of water and heat conditions, there is a lot of seasonal and intertemporal fluctuations. Consequently, although the annual management plan on balancing grass and livestock has strategic significance, there are years or seasonal of overgrazing and years or seasonal of under- utilization in practice, which impairs on achieving the annual management goal. Therefore, it is urgently needed to focus and expand the grassland management from monitoring the grassland productivity to the monitoring of grassland ecosystem healthiness, to realize the transformation from the annual management plan on balancing grass and livestock to the management goal on multiple year volatility balancing.

Fourth, land desertification is caused by the mutual effect of climate change and human activities, which is a major challenge to the protection and restoration of terrestrial ecosystem. In the 21st century, China reversed the trend of expansion of desertification over the decades, but the reduction is still fragile and unstable. The prevention and control of land desertification is not only a major ecological project, but also a major social project, which requires support from policies and programs, and moreover requires technological and organizational innovation. At the same time, desert ecosystem is one of the important types among terrestrial ecosystem, whose function and service value deserve more attention.

Fifth, China has finished the initial steps towards establishing the protection system for wetland ecosystem, but is still facing the challenges of weak law system on the protection and restoration, and the fact that the sustainable mechanism still need to be perfected.

Sixth, biodiversity protection is of great importance, yet it is still in the process of scientific research and deepening understanding in the field. It is a long way to go in protecting biodiversity. The establishment of nature reserves is an important measure in protecting biodiversity in China, but the current natural reserve management system by administrative level has led to a predicament for the management of non-national level natural reserve. In fact, the natural reserves should be classified according to the importance of ecosystem protected, and ideally not by the administrative level. At least, the natural reserve at the municipal level and county level should be dismissed and merged.