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In 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) replaced the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), providing guidance and direction for the future development of countries around the world. Both MDG and SDG have established multiple indicators to achieve environmental sustainability. However, few studies have compared the changes in the ecological environment during the two periods. Therefore, this study selected the seven major river basins in China as the study area and comprehensively assessed the changes in ecosystem service importance (ESI) within different basins in the MDG and SDG periods based on six ecosystem services, including habitat quality, soil conservation, water yield, carbon storage, grain production, and aesthetic landscape. Specifically, the changes from 2000 to 2015 and 2015 to 2020 were used to represent MDG and SDG periods, respectively. The results showed that the overall ESI of the seven major river basins showed an increasing trend in both periods, and the proportion of extremely important basins reached 20.39% in 2020, mostly distributed in the Yangtze River basin and the Pearl River basin. Except for carbon storage, other ecosystem services were restored in the SDG period. However, COVID-19 and a series of sudden disasters in 2020 have greatly affected grain production and the aesthetic landscape. The fluctuation of habitat quality also indicated that although the ecological environment has a trend of recovery, there was still some degradation compared to 20 years ago. National protection policies and restoration projects have gradually improved the ecological environment of the seven river basins and are striving to reach the SDG standards step by step. However, many problems still need to be solved urgently, such as the reduction of ecological land, the increase in carbon emissions, and the weak resilience to disasters. China has made significant positive progress in MDG, and more efforts are needed to achieve the SDG goals in the future. [Display omitted] • The changes in ecosystem services and their importance of the seven major river basins in China were explored. • The ecosystem service importance has steadily increased in the MDG and SDG periods. • China ecological policies and restoration projects have been essential to mitigate the environment degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formulation of different ecological zone plans according to the corresponding protection targets and the necessity of proper conservation policy is one of the measures to achieve the goal of ecological conservation in China. In order to clarify the interrelation among key ecological zone plans, this paper carried out the research on spatial relation of priority areas of biodiversity conservation and three key ecological areas (key ecological function areas, key regions of ecological service function, national nature reserves) and the research on ecological conditions, based on multi-scale ecological spatial theme information, which incorporates elements like ecological quality and type, and by the aid of spatial information analysis and GIS modeling. The results showed a contrastively fine spatial consistency with 68.8% of priority areas of biodiversity conservation overlapping with three key ecological areas. Although the environment in priority areas of biodiversity conservation were in good conditions, protection pressure is also increasing, powerful supervision and protection should not be ignored. The environmental conditions in the overlapping areas, as a whole, were superior to those in the non-overlapping areas. Since two areas have different characteristics, targeted protection measures should be formulated based on this difference, which will be very important for biodiversity conservation in priority areas of biodiversity conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]