Vulnerability evolution of the ecological-economic-social complex system and the key influencing factors in the sandy region of Inner Mongolia from 2000 to 2018

Under the combined effects of climate change and human activities, the rapidly change of the ecological-economic-social complex system in sandy areas poses serious challenges to desertification control and regional sustainable development. Therefore, it is of great significance to reveal the vulnerability evolution law of the ecological-economic-social complex system in sandy region, identify the key factors affecting the vulnerability evolution for the sustainable management of sandy region. In this paper, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region was taken as the research area, and the VSD（Vulnerability Scoping Diagram） model was used to construct the vulnerability assessment index system for the ecological-economic-social complex system. The spatial principal component analysis and spatio-temporal geographically weighted regression model were combined to explore the spatio-temporal evolution of the vulnerability of the ecological-economic-social complex system and the influencing mechanisms of the key factors from 2000 to 2018. The results show that:（1） vulnerability, exposure, sensitivity and adaptability have strongly heterogeneous characteristics in space, and vulnerability has a distribution pattern of overall dispersion and local aggregation; the spatial distribution of exposure is high in the middle and low on both sides; the spatial distribution of sensitivity is high in the west and low in the east; the distribution of high and low values of adaptability is the opposite of vulnerability.（2） Vulnerability changes generally show a trend of decreasing in most regions and an increasing trend in some areas. The areas with vulnerability significantly increase mainly concentrated in the southern Inner Mongolia.（3） The factors that affect the distribution of vulnerability are different each year, but in general, ecological indicators such as vegetation cover, desertification degree and meteorological indices are the main factors that affect significant change in vulnerability.