A conservation planning framework for China's national key ecological function area based on ecological risk assessment

National Key Ecological Functions Areas (NKEFAs) in China perform critical ecological functions and play a key role in ensuring the ecological safety of a large region or the whole country. Conservation planning in NKEFAs needs to scientifically locate conservation areas and development sites to support the "globally conserved, locally developed" strategy. However, popular conservation planning approaches often underestimate the impacts of natural and anthropogenic stressors and thus fail to handle the conflicts between conservation and development goals. This article proposes a conservation planning framework (CP-NKEFA) to overcome the limitations of popular conservation planning approaches and fulfill the conservation planning requirements of China's NKEFAs. Conservation planning is converted to an ecological risk assessment problem to integrate natural and anthropogenic stressors analysis with ecosystem service (ES) evaluation. The framework clarifies stressor types and quantifies stressor risks and ES importance to set conservation, development, and buffer zones. As a case study, the framework was implemented in Changyang County, China, an NKEFA for water and soil retention in the Three Gorges Reservoir Region. The framework is more useful than typical ecological redline zoning for instructing conservation and development spatial arrangement with a multi-category zoning scheme. The zoning results protect the areas vulnerable to natural and anthropogenic stressors or significant for ES provisions. Furthermore, the buffer zone prevents direct impacts of human activities on conservation areas and permits trade-offs between conservation and development goals. Except for NKEFAs, the framework also applies to conservation planning in other areas where conservation and development goals must be handled.