Assessing the Beautiful China Initiative from an environmental perspective: indicators, goals, and provincial performance.

The Beautiful China Initiative (BCI) is part of China's national strategy for implementing the long-term goals of building an ecological civilization and promoting sustainable development. However, currently, there is no goal-oriented, comparable, and standardized indicator framework for monitoring the performance of the BCI. Here, we established the BCI from an environmental perspective (BCIE) index comprising 40 indicators and targets in eight fields and used a systematic approach to measure the distance and progress towards the goal of building a "Beautiful China" by 2035 at the national and subnational levels. Our analyses indicate that the BCIE index score (range: [0, 1]) was 0.757 at the national level and 0.628-0.869 at the provincial level in 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, the BCIE index scores of all provinces improved; however, large spatio-temporal variations were evident. Provinces with better BCIE performances exhibited relatively balanced scores across different sectors and cities. Our study revealed that the BCIE index scores at the city level surpassed provincial administrative boundaries, resulting in a wider range of aggregation. By focusing on the strategic arrangement of BCI, this study provides an effective index system and evaluation method for dynamic monitoring and phased evaluations at all levels of government in China.