Slower vegetation greening faced faster social development on the landscape of the Belt and Road region

The thinking of landscape sustainability discussed thewin-win goal of landscape management for both ecological conservation and social development. The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative has a pathway of green development towards sustainability, which could be benefited from a corporation on transnational landscape management. Although previous remote sensing observations showed that the ecosystem improvement and social development can coexist in most of the Belt and Road region, whether the change tendencies can be sustained have been neglected. Based on the continuous vegetation index, nighttime light and landcover datasets between 1980s-2010s, a detailed observation of the landscape evolution was obtained in this study. Depending on the identifications of temporal breakpoints, the time series was separated to identify the former and latter tendencies, and the evolution score were evaluated. The results showed that the vegetation greening trend weakened in nearly half of the region, and the arid region mostly experienced vegetation browning lately. The evolution patterns of ecological landscape and social landscape were coincided distributed in China and India, and in Southeast Asia was not scored high for both ecological conservation and social development. Consequently, we should not be overly optimistic about the synergy between ecosystem improvement and social development. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.