Abstract—Compared to urban ecosystems, rural ecoenvironmental
conditions have received relatively little attention
from experts and scholars. However, evaluating rural ecoenvironmental
quality serves as a crucial component and
scientific basis for promoting sustainable ecological
development. It facilitates a deeper understanding of the actual
state of rural eco-environments, thereby providing scientific
support for precise management by administrative departments,
holding practical significance for advancing urbanization. This
paper summarizes recent research progress in rural ecoenvironmental
quality evaluation, covering aspects such as
indicator systems, evaluation methods, and development
prospects. It also provides recommendations for constructing an
indicator system for rural eco-environmental quality evaluation.
From 2001 to August 2025, 556 key articles indexed in SCI and
SSCI were systematically reviewed to examine the development
of rural eco-environmental quality evaluation methods. The
results show that, influenced by domestic policy orientations,
most case studies have been concentrated in China and focus
primarily on understanding ecological functions, with limited
integration of spatiotemporal and multi-dimensional analysis.
To address these limitations, this study proposes a ruraloriented
eco-environmental quality evaluation framework that
adopts a comprehensive weighting strategy combining both
objective and subjective methods, and leverages dynamic,
spatially explicit indices such as the Remote Sensing Ecological
Index (RSEI) to meet the demands of precise rural management.
The application of this framework enhances the
comprehensiveness of eco-environmental quality evaluation,
yielding more actionable insights to inform rural planning and
policy decisions.
Keywords—rural ecological environment, eco-environmental
quality evaluation, eco-environmental index
Cite:Ge Yu, Kim Dirks, and Priyanka Dhopade, "Index System of Evaluation of Rural Eco-Environmental Quality: A Review," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 185-192, 2026.
Copyright © 2026 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).