Abstract:

Background & Aim: Biodiversity loss constitutes one of the most pressing ecological crises of the twenty-first century. Conventional conservation approaches centered on direct driver intervention—protected area designation, habitat restoration, species recovery and pollution control—have proven structurally insufficient, as evidenced by the failure to fully achieve any of the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets globally by 2020. The Transformative Change Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) argues that the root causes of biodiversity decline reside in indirect structural drivers—production–consumption patterns, institutional arrangements and socio-cultural norms—and that systemic transformation of these upstream mechanisms is indispensable. This paper develops a comparative analytical framework contrasting direct driver intervention with transformative change across four dimensions (governance targets, governance scale, policy instruments and evaluative criteria) and applies it to diagnose China's current governance trajectory in the context of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Building on this framework, we further clarify the defining features that distinguish transformative change from incremental governance improvement, propose an operational definition of transformation-oriented biodiversity governance in the Chinese context, and derive a four-link mechanism of institutional translation: national strategic coordination, spatial governance anchoring, sectoral policy embedding, and feedback from local experimentation. 

Progress: This review reveals that China has established a solid governance foundation, including a protected area system covering approximately 18% of its terrestrial territory, an ecological conservation redline encompassing over 30% of national land, a substantially strengthened legislative framework, and an updated National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (2023–2030). The analysis shows that national strategies translate the ecological civilization agenda into overarching goals; ecological conservation redlines, protected areas and territorial spatial planning anchor these goals in spatial rules; the “1+N” policy system is intended to embed biodiversity requirements in relevant economic sectors; and local pilot programmes provide feedback for policy calibration and institutional diffusion. Nevertheless, the analysis identifies four structural bottlenecks: limited intervention along causal driver chains, insufficient mainstreaming constraints in core economic sectors, incomplete cross-ministerial coordination, and evaluation frameworks that do not yet capture transformative processes. In particular, the assessment and disclosure of large companies' biodiversity dependencies, impacts and risks—including those along supply and value chains—remain underdeveloped. 

Perspectives: Taken together, the findings indicate that deepening China’s biodiversity governance transition depends not primarily on adding individual conservation instruments, but on strengthening the coupling and feedback among national strategy, spatial rules, sectoral responsibilities and local experimentation. This four-link mechanism extends the explanatory scope of the IPBES transformative change framework from identifying drivers of biodiversity loss to explaining how global transformation goals are translated into spatial governance rules, sectoral responsibilities and adaptive policy feedback within a national governance system.

Key words: biodiversity governance, IPBES, transformative change, ecological civilization, territorial spatial governance, Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework