The regional difference, dynamic evolution, and multidimensional inequality of China’s ecological environment quality from the concept of ecological resilience

Based on the concept of ecological resilience, this paper systematically constructs an evaluation system of ecological environment quality and dynamically measures the ecological environment quality (EQI) and its dimensional oriented indices: environmental pollution production (PPI), environmental pollution management (PMI), and ecological environment restoration (ERI). Then, the dynamic evolution of EQI, PPI, PMI, and ERI could be analyzed by the kernel density estimation and Markov chain, and the multidimensional inequality and its sources of ecological environment quality are studied by Maasoumi index. The main conclusions are as follows: China’s EQI shows a tendency of slow growth despite swings. In terms of dimensional-oriented indices, PPI exhibits a slow decreasing trend, and PMI and ERI exhibit an ongoing upward trend. There are showing signs of sustained improvement of EQI across regions, especially in the southwest and northwest. Meanwhile, EQI has the evolutionary characteristics of increasing internal regional synergy and inter-regional differentiation effects. The multidimensional inequality of EQI shows a downward trend first and then an upward trend, and its contribution decreases in turn with “PPI-ERI-PMI.” There are obvious differences in the multidimensional inequality of EQI across regions. The intra-regional inequality is absolutely dominant. The marginal contribution of this paper is to construct an evaluation framework of ecological environment quality based on the concept of ecological resilience and to conduct empirical research on China’s ecological environment quality, so as to further explain the spatial distribution, evolutionary path, and formation mechanism of China’s ecological environment quality.