Abstract: With global change intensifying, the ecological environment has been disturbed and damaged, resulting in increasingly evident ecological security problems. During the 21st century, ecosystem risk (or safety) assessment has become an internationally recognized discipline at the forefront of global change and ecology research. A key object of ecological safety research is to identify and understand the tolerance threshold of the different types of ecosystems at various scales and the processes of adaptive management of ecosystems under global change stress. This paper takes the different elements affecting ecosystems as the starting point to review the theory and application of the ecological safety threshold concept. The literature reveals the interrelationship between ecological steady-state processes and perturbations of climate change, impacting on carbon and nitrogen cycles, with a consequent need for changes to land and grassland use, and regional policy regimes, among others. Furthermore, improving detection of ecological safety thresholds in major ecosystems and the precision of forecasts about their behavior is pivotal to restoration of degraded ecosystems and the protection and management of the ecological environment. Because of the complexity of the changes to ecosystem processes induced by the various stress factors, and gaps in knowledge about the processes themselves, especially in relation to defining health and sustainability in different types of ecosystem, the determination and predictive capability pertaining to the ecological safety threshold is currently very limited, and there is still great uncertainty.