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• Landscape multifunctionality was identified based on the spatial hotspots approach. • Constructing the landscape ecological risk index with landscape indices. • The GWR model was used to explore the impact of landscape multifunctionality change on regional ecological risk. Landscape multifunctionality is regard as a powerful concept to identify effects of environment change, while the landscape ecological risk (LER), as a negative representation of this effect, few studies explored the relationship between them. Therefore, taking Beijing city as the research site, we analyzed the spatiotemporal changes of landscape multifunctionality and the LER in 2000–2010, then the spatial variation of the impact of landscape multifunctionality on the LER was explored by the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model. The results showed that: (1) The high areas of multifunctionality showed an upward trend and gradually expanded from the northwest to the southwest. Whereas the low areas of multifunctionality were clumped in the southeast and showed a downward trend over time. (2) The overall pattern of the LER exhibited an obvious structure of east–west polarization. The extra-high-risk areas were concentrated in the northeast and southeast of the urban center, with the area decreased over time and gradually transformed from clustering to dispersion. While the low- and sub-low-risk areas were mainly distributed in the western of the study area and showed an increasing trend. (3) The GWR analysis indicated that the relationship between landscape multifunctionality and the LER existed an negatively correlation, and a few of positive correlation areas shrinking gradually from the northwest and southwest corner of the urban center to the urban center. It was remarkable that the shrinking areas were basically consistent with the expansion direction of the high multifunctionality areas, which indicated that the increase of high multifunctionality can reduced the LER to some extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]