Balancing the international benefits and risks associated with implementation of ecological policy on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau shows accelerating degradation due to climate change and human activities, leaving residents facing the dual challenges of ecological degradation and poverty. To restore the ecosys-tems and achieve sustainable regional development, one of the Chinese extensive ecological restoration policies has been implemented since the 1980s. Traditional policies focused on meeting local develop-ment goals, but ignored impacts on neighboring countries, leading to international disputes. To minimize disputes, this study proposed a universal framework to quantify the impacts of regional ecological policy on the plateau and surrounding countries by combining ecosystem service (ES) models and flows process. The simulation flows process was programmed with Interactive Data Language (IDL) and analyzed with ArcGIS. The results showed that the plateau's ecosystem structure, ecological health, and ecosystem ser-vices can be protected while improving the livelihoods of residents (revenue increasing and disasters mitigation) with implementation of ecological policy. Based on the cross-regional movements of the physical and economic flows of ES, this study revealed that regional ecological policy increased the ben-efits of soil conservation and sandstorm prevention in neighboring countries, however, reduced the sur-rounding water supply, which could aggravate the risk of water conflicts between humans and nature.. Ecological policy implementation that accounts for cross-regional impacts provides a new way to allevi-ate international resource allocation disputes.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of International Association for Gondwana Research. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Automated summary

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau is experiencing accelerated degradation due to climate change and human activities, posing dual challenges of ecological degradation and poverty for residents. To address this, China has implemented extensive ecological restoration policies since the 1980s. This study proposes a universal framework to quantify the impacts of regional ecological policy on the plateau and surrounding countries, considering ecosystem services and flows process. The research shows that the implementation of ecological policy can protect the plateau's ecosystem and improve residents' livelihoods, but it may also lead to water conflicts between humans and nature.