China's financially dominated ecological compensation system is now facing great challenges due to the fund limitation. It is important, with the market-based instruments, to reconstruct China's ecological protection and compensation system for the continued advancement of the ecological conservation and the construction of the eco-civilization. This paper aims to clarify the boundaries and the associations of the ecological protection, the ecological restoration, and the ecological compensation. Based on the principle of "spoilers to make compensation, protectors to get benefits and beneficiaries to pay the cost", this paper proposes a basic ecological compensation system that compensates the ecological land occupied and damaged by the economic construction and rewards various actions of the ecological conservation with the goal of a net gain for the biodiversity. Optimizing the right-based compensation mechanism and improving the revenue-based compensation mechanism are the fundamental routines to establish a sustainable market-oriented, diversified ecological compensation system.

ecological conservation  /  ecological restoration  /  ecological compensation  /  biodiversity offsets  /  market-based instrument  /  right-based compensation mechanism  /  revenue-based compensation mechanism