Using more, caring less? Exploring the relationship between environmental attitudes and direct ecosystem services use in China

Abstract

Ecosystem services (ES) use and environmental attitudes (EA) represent a central yet theoretically contested and empirically inconclusive relationship in the human-environment feedbacks, highlighting the urgent need for longitudinal and context-specific investigation. Using China as a case study, we quantified direct ES use for basic needs (cooking, drinking, working, and housing) based on provincial-level census data (2000, 2010, 2020), and measured EA using the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale from the Chinese General Social Survey. Spearman correlation and hierarchical clustering were used to examine the direct ES use and EA relationship. We found that (1) direct ES use for basic needs declined by over 60 % on average from 2000 to 2020, with fewer than 25 % of households still directly relying on ES in 2020, particularly among rural residents in northeastern and southwestern China. (2) NEP scores were lower in rural areas and declined in most provinces from 2010 to 2020. (3) Direct ES use and NEP scores were negatively correlated, with a stronger relationship observed in 2010 than in 2020. (4) Socioeconomically developed provinces with lower direct ES use generally showed higher EA, while higher ES dependence—especially on biomass—was linked to lower EA. Our findings highlight the challenges in fostering sustainable behaviors in regions where direct ES use remains high. Targeted interventions, such as enhanced environmental education and sustainable resource management, are needed to strengthen the linkage between ecosystem dependence and environmental awareness.

Keywords

Ecosystem services use / Environmental attitudes / New ecological paradigm / China

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Lumeng Liu: Writing - review & editing, Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Siying Zhu: Writing - review & editing, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis. Zhonghao Zhang: Writing - review & editing, Supervision. Shuyao Wu: Writing - review & editing. Lingmeng Hu: Data curation.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Foundation (Grants No. 24YJCZH174 and 22YJCZH252), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. 42542012 and 42271307), the National Natural Science Foundation of China International Cooperation Program (Grant No. 42361144861), and the Pujiang Talent Program (Grant No. 22PJC090).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2026.100417.

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