The Impact of China's National Key Ecological Function Areas Policy on Ecosystem Service Enhancement

The evaluation of the effectiveness of ecological conservation policies is crucial for ensuring their successful implementation. China's national key ecological function areas (NKEFAs) policy is a massive conservation program designed to enhance ecosystem services (ESs) and maintain national ecological security. However, a comprehensive assessment of its effectiveness in enhancing ESs has been lacking. In order to fill this gap, this study used the propensity score matching and difference‐in‐differences (PSM‐DID) method to quantify the spatio‐temporal effects of the NKEFAs policy on dominant ESs across four functional areas (biodiversity maintenance areas, water conservation areas, soil conservation areas, and sand‐fixing areas) from 2000 to 2022. The results indicated that, spatially, the ESs enhancement in the four NKEFA types significantly exceeded non‐NKEFAs, confirming the overall spatial effectiveness of the policy. However, it was noteworthy that 34.53% of the samples were found to be ineffective, indicating considerable potential for optimizing the spatial management. Additionally, there was an uneven distribution of effectiveness levels among the 25 areas, with significant deficiencies observed in Hainan Island and the Altai region. Temporally, the improvement level of ESs accelerated after the policy's implementation (post‐2010), but the improvement effects in water conservation areas and soil conservation areas remained relatively weak. Our findings suggested that future management of NKEFAs should focus on systematic and multi‐objective design while also preventing excessive vegetation restoration having a trade‐off effect on water yield services. This study provides a novel methodological framework and empirical evidence for evaluating the effectiveness of large‐scale ecological protection policies.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Land Degradation & Development

• Publication date

  2025-11-16

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1002/ldr.70289
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Quantitative assessment of ecological conservation effectiveness and spillover effects of China's first group of national parks

  2025cited by this paper
• Spatiotemporal evolution and influencing factors of ecosystem services on Hainan Island from 1985 to 2022: Insights from long-term annual assessments and spatial econometric models.

  2025cited by this paper
• Towards ecological security: Two-thirds of China’s ecoregions experienced a decline in habitat quality from 1992 to 2020

  2025cited by this paper
• Evaluating the effectiveness of the Shan-Shui Initiatives in China

  2025cited by this paper
• Revealing multi-scale characteristics of ecosystem services supply and demand imbalance to enhance refined ecosystem management in China

  2025cited by this paper
• Promoting the realization of ecological product value through ecological compensation: Empirical evidence from the transfer payments for China's National Key Ecological Function Zones

  2025cited by this paper
• Complex interactions of ecosystem services and their dynamic changes in response to land-use conflicts—A network analysis in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

  2025cited by this paper
• Assessment of the effectiveness of China’s protected areas in enhancing ecosystem services

  2024cited by this paper
• Spatial spillover effects of ecosystem service values in northeast China tiger and leopard national park based on spatial Durbin model

  2024cited by this paper
• Upgrading protected areas can improve or reverse the decline in conservation effectiveness: Evidence from the Tibetan Plateau, China.

  2023cited by this paper
• Effectiveness and driving mechanism of ecological restoration efforts in China from 2009 to 2019.

  2023cited by this paper
• Improvement of ecosystem quality in National Key Ecological Function Zones in China during 2000-2015.

  2022cited by this paper
• Integrating ecosystem services modeling into effectiveness assessment of national protected areas in a typical arid region in China.

  2021cited by this paper
• How does the local-scale relationship between ecosystem services and human wellbeing vary across broad regions?

  2021cited by this paper
• How do government policies promote greening? Evidence from China

  2021cited by this paper
• Effectiveness of protected areas in reducing deforestation and forest fragmentation in Bangladesh.

  2020cited by this paper
• Role of monitoring in environmental regulation: An empirical analysis of grazing restrictions in pastoral China

  2020cited by this paper
• Which management measures lead to better performance of China's protected areas in reducing forest loss?

  2020cited by this paper
• Statistical matching for conservation science

  2019cited by this paper
• The Effects of Interaction between Climate Change and Land‐Use/Cover Change on Biodiversity‐Related Ecosystem Services

  2019cited by this paper
• Quantification and driving force analysis of ecosystem services supply, demand and balance in China.

  2019cited by this paper
• Balance diagnostics after propensity score matching.

  2019cited by this paper
• A global-level assessment of the effectiveness of protected areas at resisting anthropogenic pressures

  2019cited by this paper
• Evaluating the effectiveness of policy instruments for biodiversity: Impact evaluation, cost-effectiveness analysis and other approaches

  2018cited by this paper
• Linking the benefits of ecosystem services to sustainable spatial planning of ecological conservation strategies.

  2018cited by this paper
• Are ecosystem service hotspots located in protected areas? Results from a study in Southern Italy

  2017cited by this paper
• Participation in the implementation of Natura 2000: A comparative study of six EU member states

  2017cited by this paper
• Scale dependency in effectiveness, isolation, and social‐ecological spillover of protected areas

  2016cited by this paper
• Species recovery in the united states: Increasing the effectiveness of the endangered species act

  2016cited by this paper
• A Global Analysis of Deforestation in Moist Tropical Forest Protected Areas

  2015cited by this paper
• Paper park performance: Mexico's natural protected areas in the 1990s

  2015cited by this paper
• Conservation Planning: A Review of Return on Investment Analysis

  2015cited by this paper
• Making parks make a difference: poor alignment of policy, planning and management with protected-area impact, and ways forward

  2015cited by this paper
• Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction

  2015cited by this paper
• Global Protected Area Expansion: Creating More than Paper Parks

  2015cited by this paper
• Shifting nature conservation approaches in Natura 2000 and the implications for the roles of stakeholders

  2014cited by this paper
• Analysis of changes in meteorological variables using Mann-Kendall and Sen's slope estimator statistical tests in Serbia

  2013cited by this paper
• Mapping and modelling ecosystem services for science, policy and practice

  2013cited by this paper
• Greenness in semi-arid areas across the globe 1981–2007 — an Earth Observing Satellite based analysis of trends and drivers

  2012cited by this paper
• Evaluation of Ecological Restoration Effects in China:A Review

  2009cited by this paper
• Some Methods of Propensity‐Score Matching had Superior Performance to Others: Results of an Empirical Investigation and Monte Carlo simulations

  2009cited by this paper
• The working for water programme Evolution of a payments for ecosystem services mechanism that addresses both poverty and ecosystem service delivery in South Africa

  2008cited by this paper
• A critical appraisal of propensity‐score matching in the medical literature between 1996 and 2003

  2008cited by this paper
• Restoration of wetlands in the Mississippi–Ohio–Missouri (MOM) River Basin: Experience and needed research

  2006cited by this paper
• Matching As An Econometric Evaluation Estimator

  1998cited by this paper
• The habitat concept and a plea for standard terminology

  1997cited by this paper
• The central role of the propensity score in observational studies for causal effects

  1983cited by this paper
• Review of the approaches for assessing protected areas' effectiveness

  year unknowncited by this paper

• No citing papers are available for this paper.