Ecological security evaluation of Africa

Abstract

Africa, the second largest continent in the world, has achieved remarkable economic and political results through exploration and positive development. Ecological security comprehensively reflects the health and integrity of an ecosystem, and it is broadly defined as the security state of a complex artificial ecosystem composed of natural, economic and social factors. Ecological security determines the potential for sustainable development in Africa, especially with its rapidly developing economies. However, there is a lack of information on the ecological security state of the continent as a whole. In this study, we constructed an evaluation system based on a pressure-state-response model and evaluated the ecological security state of all 54 African countries. The results showed that, at the national level, the ecological security state of the countries in Africa differed, as did their spatial and temporal variations from 1995 to 2016. In general, African countries showed relatively good ecological security. The years 2007 and 2001 were the worst and best years, respectively, in terms of ecological security during the study period. At the regional level, North Africa and West Africa had the best and worst ecological security, respectively.

Keywords

Africa / ecological security / evaluation system / PSR model

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31770480) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (lzujbky-2018-103).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Huihui Wei, Wenjuan Zhang, Feng Zhang, and Guojun Sun declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2020. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)