Integrating climate, biodiversity, and sustainable land-use strategies: innovations from China

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a framework for spatially explicit integration of climate and biodiversity policies, with China as a case study.

🏢実務担当者:Offers insights into spatial planning tools like redlines that can inform corporate land-use and sustainability strategies.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need for integrated national strategies and the potential of LT-LEDS to incorporate spatial planning.

To reverse the accelerating degradation of biodiversity and ecosystem services (‘nature’) and climate [1,2], the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will hold major meetings in 2021. We argue that, as a critical priority, countries need to design and implement integrated national strategies to achieve the goals of the three Rio Conventions (including the UN Convention to Combat Desertification—UNCCD) using spatially explicit analyses and policies. This integration can maximize co-benefits and help manage trade-offs to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Nature-based solutions (NBS) provide an important framework for such integration. An advantage of our proposal is that it requires no negotiations among governments, since available convention instruments can achieve this integration. In particular, long-term low-emission development strategies (LT-LEDS) under the Paris Agreement could play a critical role by requiring a spatially explicit approach to NBS and other land uses. Moreover, China has recently introduced major domestic policy innovations that hold important lessons for designing and implementing spatially explicit policy frameworks to simultaneously pursue the objectives of Rio Conventions. We argue that countries can learn from experiences in China and elsewhere to integrate nature, climate and sustainable management of land and ocean, including targeted conservation and restoration of nature, into their LT-LEDS. We also highlight key design and implementation challenges. The three Rio Conventions pursue closely related objectives that integrate across climate, nature and land-use management. These objectives exhibit synergies and some trade-offs. However, national strategies and international policy processes under each convention tend to be siloed and lack the ambition and resources to meet the objectives of the conventions (Supplementary Information—SI). In 2019, political momentum developed to overcome this artificial separation drawing also on the SDGs, which place the objectives of the Rio Conventions into a broader context. For example, a Canada-hosted Nature Champions Summits called for ‘uniting nature conservation objectives with addressing climate change and developing NBS that are effective for both’. In the run-up to the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit in September 2015, China and New Zealand led a coalition of countries that adopted the NBS Manifesto to promote NBS as part of the UN climate agenda with backing from the presidents of China and France and other heads of state (SI). NBS are critical to achieve the objectives of all Rio Conventions. Terrestrial NBS represent about one-third of the potential to reduce net greenhouse-gas emissions [3] and are central to climate adaptation and sustainable water management. Ocean-based mitigation options can make substantial contributions towards a 1.5°C pathway. Many global and national initiatives promote avoided deforestation, reforestation and other NBS, but most efforts are project-based without adequate integration into national strategies. This may generate leakage and trade-offs with other SDG priorities. Integrating NBS with spatial planning is novel in the context of the Rio Conventions, but intuitive, since NBS relate to broader questions of land use, land management and competition for scarce land, ocean and water resources. For example, protecting a threatened species may require place-based interventions to protect natural habitat, which might have climate benefits and lower the potential for agriculture. Spatial planning needs to address all policy objectives to tackle trade-offs, particularly with regard to biodiversity objectives, or else it may lead to negative outcomes, as has happened in the past with some land-restoration programs in China [4] and elsewhere. Similarly, experiences with protected areas in China [5] and globally show that spatial approaches to managing nature must take into account the needs of local and other affected populations to ensure acceptability and to meet environmental as well as socio-economic objectives, including reducing the risk of new zoonotic diseases (SI). Despite the need for spatial-policy tools to operationalize NBS, our own review of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) shows that none of the 195 submitted climate strategies include an actionable map. None details how to manage co-benefits and trade-offs with nature and land-degradation objectives. NDCs cover only parts of emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry, often without quantitative targets or clear accounting [6,7] and inadequate treatment of agriculture [8]. Similarly, current national biodiversity strategies under the CBD do not systematically tackle drivers of nature loss, and only 15% include actionable maps for nature's contribution to people [1], including carbon sequestration [9]. The absence of maps and spatial analyses demonstrates that national strategies under the Rio Conventions do not adequately tackle the complex questions of synergies and trade-offs between competing uses for land and sea. With 18% of the global population and only 10% of arable land, China is highly vulnerable to loss of agricultural land and nature's contributions to people. Since the 1980s, the country has undertaken some of the largest land-restoration programs in the world [4]. Yet, nature continued to decline precipitously and, in 1998, China experienced catastrophic flooding of the Yangtze River, which killed >4000 people. The realization that these floods had been exacerbated by deforestation, draining of wetlands and other inappropriate land-management practices spurred the government to consider more ambitious and integrated policies to conserve and restore nature [10]. This led to a growing focus on Ecological Civilization—a broad framework for balancing political, economic, social and environmental objectives, which was first mentioned at the 17th CPC National Congress in 2007 and incorporated into the Chinese constitution in 2018. China has developed national and provincial spatial-zoning plans that cover and integrate functional zones: critical ecological functions, agricultural production and zones for industrial development and human settlements [11]. To strengthen coherence, these initially disparate spatial-planning frameworks are now being consolidated by the Ministry for Natural Resources under a single, integrated land-use-management plan for China to be incorporated into the 14th Five-Year Plan, which take effect in 2021. This will give China a land-use-management framework that integrates across the three Rio Conventions with important lessons for other countries and global policy processes. These spatial-planning frameworks include ‘redlines’ that delineate areas for special protection or management. As one example, an agricultural redline identifies a minimum agricultural production space of 120 million hectares that must be maintained. Conversion of agricultural land within the agricultural redline is only possible if new agricultural land is brought under production elsewhere in the country. This approach is similar to spatial-zoning regulations in force in many industrialized countries, but the latter do not tend to apply and enforce minimum land requirements for meeting ecological needs at national and provincial levels. China's Ecological Conservation Redline (ECRL) [10] was first put forward by scientists in 2000, proposed by the State Council in 2011 and then listed as one of the main tasks of Ecological Civilization in 2013. The government uses four steps to identify high-priority areas for biodiversity, ecosystem services and disaster risk reduction covering a quarter of the territory [10]. First, an initial ECRL is identified combining existing protected areas that are important for biodiversity (roughly 18% of the country) with additional priority areas identified through high-resolution mappings of nature using remote sensing and data from 114 500 ground survey sites combined with ecosystem-services modeling [12]. Second, the ECRL is coordinated and aligned with other land-use-planning frameworks, including for agriculture, industry, mining, urban areas and infrastructure. Third, the ECRL is aligned across provinces and coastal areas to ensure the continuity and effective management of cross-boundary ecosystems. Fourth, these ECRL boundaries are then revised in consultation with local governments to balance ecological needs and local development priorities, often leading to significant adjustments to address local concerns [10]. The ECRL covers some 25% of China's land mass. ECRL management aims to ensure no change in land cover, no net loss of biodiversity and no degradation of other ecosystem services inside the ECRL. Correspondingly, the management practices range from strictly protected areas with no significant human presence to watershed protection areas that can sustain some agriculture and limited other human activities. By mapping areas of high significance for nature and comparing them with actual and desired socio-economic land uses, the four steps of ECRL design identify potential land-use conflicts across China. For example, the extension of an industrial park designed to generate local employment and revenues might damage a globally significant wetland. Restrictions on dredging may hamper shipping. Reducing the fragmentation of habitat for critical species may call for the relocation of people, which may be resisted. Since local authorities in China derive a large share of their revenues from selling or leasing land, compensatory revenues may be needed in return for the expansion of ECRL. To compensate local governments for economic losses sustained by putting land inside the ECRL, China is scaling up ‘ecological compensation’ payments including the transfer of RMB 62.7bn ($9.4bn, 0.08% GDP) from

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwaa139first seen 2026-08-02 18:02:50