Qinghai Province has a very fragile ecological environment and is an important component of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. To understand the disturbance caused by human activities to the local ecological system, it is necessary to evaluate the response of ecological service functions to land use change in Qinghai Province and to uncover the sensitivity of ecological service functions to land use change. This study uses a proxy-based method and proposes a sensitivity index to describe the degree of ecological service function response to the land use change in Qinghai Province. The findings were as follows. (1) From 1988 to 2008, the area of cultivated land, construction land and water in Qinghai Province increased, and forest land and grassland continuously decreased. The agricultural economy and the development of urbanization are the main driving factors in land use change in this area. Policies and eco-environmental engineering, such as the grain-for-green project, the Three-North shelterbelt project and the natural forest protection project, have certain effects on controlling the expansion of cultivated land. (2) The value of ecosystem services in Qinghai Province was 157.368 billion yuan, 157.149 billion yuan and 157.726 billion yuan in 1988, 2000 and 2008, respectively, decreasing and then increasing again. (3) The average sensitivity index values of ecological services in Qinghai Province for the periods 1988–2000 and 2000–2008 was 0.693 and 1.137, respectively. This means that for every 1% increase in land use change, the ecological service value fluctuated by 0.693% and 1.137% in those periods.

The Three-Rivers Headwaters region (TRHR) is an ecological shelter located in the northeast of the Tibetan Plateau, China, that provides environmental protection and regional sustainable development. This region also provides ecosystem services including water supply and soil conservation and exerts major impacts on both its surroundings, as well as the whole of China. A number of ecological restoration projects have been initiated within the TRHR since 2000, including the creation of a natural reserve. Analyses of trends in land use/land cover (LULC), net primary productivity (NPP), water yield and soil conservation within the TRHR are presented based on regional climate and land use datasets and utilizing the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model in tandem with the double mass curve (DMC) approach. The results of this study reveal a series of correlations between ecosystem services and lead to four distinct conclusions. First, the amount of variation between 2000 and 2012 in each LULC type within the TRHR was small. In particular, grassland substitution occurred in high-altitude areas and increased in central areas. Second, NPP, water yield, soil conservation amount and the volume of exported phosphorus (P) decreased along an east-west gradient with values of 64.44%, 38.81%, 7.37% and −49.98% recorded, respectively, between 2000 and 2012. The ecosystem services of the Yellow River basin to the east of the TRHR generally improved over the study period, while those of the Yangtze River and Lancang River basins where enhanced to a lesser extent, and obvious degradation was observed in some local areas. Third, the ecosystem services provided by forested land were highest, followed by grassland and cultivated land, respectively. Fourth, synergistic relationships were observed within the TRHR between NPP, water yield and soil conservation amount, indicating that increasing NPP simultaneously increased the values for these related factors. Synergistic relationships were also recorded between water yield and the amount of exported P, suggesting that increases in the former cause a reduction in water purity.

Ecosystem restoration has been widely concerned with the damage and degradation of ecosystems worldwide. Scientific and reasonable formulations of ecological restoration zoning is the basis for the formulation of an ecological restoration plan. In this study, a restoration zoning index system was proposed to comprehensively consider the ecological problems of ecosystems. The linear weighted function method was used to construct the ecological restoration index (ERI) as an important index of zoning. The research showed that: (1) the ecological restoration zones of the Qilian Mountains can be divided into eight basins, namely the headwaters of the Datong River Basin, the Danghe-Dahaerteng River Basin, the northern confluence area of the Qinghai Lake, the upper Shule River to middle Heihe River, the Oasis Agricultural Area in the northern foothills of the Qilian Mountain, the Huangshui Basin Valley, Aksay (corridor region of the western Hexi Basin), and the northeastern Tsaidam Basin; (2) the restoration index of the eight ecological restoration zones of the Qilian Mountains was between 0.34–0.8, with an average of 0.61 (the smaller the index, the more prominent the comprehensive ecological problem representing the regional mountains, rivers, forests, cultivated lands, lakes, and grasslands, and thus the greater the need to implement comprehensive ecological protection and restoration projects); and (3) the ecological problems of different ecological zones are frequently numerous, and often show the phenomenon of multiple overlapping ecological problems in the same zone.

The Lancang–Mekong Region encompasses six countries, covering an area exceeding five million square kilometers and containing a population of more than 400 million. Floods in this region may cause extremely serious losses of lives and property. However, due to the severe shortage of flood disaster data, loss data and meteorological monitoring data, the assessment of flood disaster risks in this region remains highly formidable. In view of this, we systematically integrated the flood disaster data from EM-DAT (the Emergency Events Database), Desinventar (a disaster information management system), Reliefweb (a humanitarian information service provided by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), and ADRC (the Asian Disaster Reduction Center), coupled with GLDAS (Global Land Data Assimilation System) precipitation data and the population and economic data from the World Bank, and comprehensively considered vulnerability, exposure, and loss criteria to assess the flood disaster risks in the Lancang–Mekong Region. The research findings are as follows: (1) From 1965 to 2017, a total of 370 floods occurred in the Lancang–Mekong Region, among which the proportion of floods in Vietnam and Thailand combined was as high as 43.7%. In contrast, the number of floods in Qinghai and Tibet in China was relatively small, with a combined proportion of only 1.89%. (2) When mild flood disasters occur, the southern part of Myanmar, the western part of Thailand, and the northeastern part of Vietnam are faced with relatively large loss threats; when moderate flood disasters occur, the central part of Myanmar, the eastern part of Cambodia, and the southern part of Vietnam are faced with comparatively large loss threats; when severe flood disasters occur, high-loss areas are mainly concentrated in the southern part of Vietnam. (3) Considering exposure, vulnerability, and hazards comprehensively, the high-risk areas of floods in the Lancang–Mekong Region are mainly distributed in the central–southern part of Myanmar, the northeastern part of Vietnam, and the southern part of the area bordering Cambodia and Vietnam; the medium-risk areas are mainly distributed in the central part of Thailand and the eastern part of Sichuan in China; relatively speaking, other areas in the Lancang–Mekong Region have a lower flood risk level. This research can provide references for flood risk assessment in regions with scarce data and technical support for flood disaster prevention and control as well as risk management in the Lancang–Mekong Region.