RESEARCH ON THE TRANSFER OF FOREST ECOLOGICAL STRESS EMBODIED IN CHINA'S LOG IMPORTS

Based on the realities that China is now the world's largest log importer and the embodied transfer of ecological elements in the process of import can cause the spillover of ecological stress to the region of origin, the authors assessed the ecological effect of China's log imports on the source countries' forest sustainability. First evaluate the ecological footprint embodied in China's log imports from 1995 to 2010, and then introduce the model of ecological tension index to assess the ecological security status of the forests in major source countries. Results demonstrate that, overall, China's import of log has posed no serious threat to world forests. The forest ecological status of most of the major sources is at safe level, although China's log import has increased the forest ecological tension by more than 14%. While for the source countries with unsafe forest resources, China just had increased their ecological tension less than 1%.