Taking Huaihai Economic Zone as an instance, the spatio-temporal evolution of land use were analyzed from 2003 to 2023. On this basis, the spatio-temporal heterogeneity and spatial agglomeration of landscape ecological risk were identified for different historical periods and scenarios by combining PLUS model, spatial statistical method and ecological risk assessment model. The results indicate the following: (1) The land use types in Huaihai Economic Zone were mainly cultivated land and construction land. The overall land use pattern has not changed much in the past 20years. Concretely, it mainly manifested as the transformation of cultivated land into construction land. (2) The landscape ecological risk index (LERI) firstly increased and then decreased. In addition, the index was high in the east but low in the west of the study area. Furthermore it was relatively high in the north but low in the south. (3) The Moran's I index of the LERI decreased first and then increased. However, the local spatial agglomeration were mainly 'high-high' and 'low-low' patterns. (4) The LERI under the three scenarios of natural development, economic priority and ecological protection were 0.2470, 0.2451 and 0.2489, respectively. Under the ecological protection scenario, high ecological risk area accounts for the largest proportion across the whole regions. In contrary, the area of low ecological risk area accounts for the largest proportion in the scenario of economic development.