Abstract: Ecological compensation is an important environmental economic policy for ecological environment protection, ecological civilization construction and ecological resources sustainable development. How to establish an equitable and efficient long-term mechanism of ecological compensation is a challenging long-term research issue in the theory and practice of ecological compensation at home and abroad, which is related to some key problems, including direction and focus of compensation policy, the effect and efficiency of policy implementation, ecological civilization construction and sustainable development. Extensive grasslands are important for producing livestock base, biodiversity conservation center, ecological safety shelter zone and food safety grounding. The grassland ecological compensation has been preliminarily established, both investment scale and coverage are larger, and obtained significant achievements, but the grassland ecological environment situation that the partial better and in whole worse has still no fundamental change. Therefore, discussing and establishing the ecological compensation mechanism, combining fairness with long-term efficiency, which is a vital measure for the coordination of multiple functions of grassland resources to achieve “win-win” outcomes for production, life and ecosystems, to ensure the sustainability of ecological resource protection and utilization. The study summarized the concept and theory of ecological compensation, the development trend of long-term mechanisms at home and abroad, demonstrated establishing the long-term mechanism of ecological compensation was very important for ecological environment protection and famers become rich. Based on field investigate on different grassland regional implementations of grasslands ecological compensation and analyzed the Herders’ production decision inherent behavior on grassland ecological compensation effects and the current implementation effects, the study considered the major challenges to grassland ecological compensation in China as follows: long-term debt leads to grassland ecological management so difficult. The grassland ecological investments are less and cycle shorter so that is difficult to effectively consolidate protection results. Herders have desirable stocking rate and inertia overstocking which affects livestock reduction for ecological compensation. The study proposes to further establish the policy suggestion for long-term mechanism of ecological compensation in accordance with the national situation of China, the main suggestions include as follows: elongate the period of ecological compensation policy, increase the award fund, implement diversified adaptive livestock reduction model, develop the grassland ecological animal husbandry management pattern and strengthen the institutional guarantee system of grassland animal husbandry. Objectives were to provide a theoretical basis and practical support for the scientific protection of fragile ecological resources, sustainable exploitation and utilization of grassland resources and ecological civilization construction in China.

Key words: grassland protection, ecological compensation, long-term mechanism, adaptive livestock reduction, supporting system