Abstract: Ecological restoration and pollution control are effective measures to improve the eco-environmental quality, while the investment on ecological restoration and environmental governance plays a key factor. For a long time, ecological restoration in mining areas has been exhibited the phenomenon of ‘more passive responses and less active actions’, the reasons including lack of investment for eco-environmental governance, unclear targets of ecological restoration and the lack of regulatory standards all have led to the appearance of formalism in the ecological restoration of mining areas that violate the laws of nature in some regions. Focused on the needs of ecological civilization construction and regional sustainable development in the new era, we redefined the scope of the mining area from the perspective of ecological and environmental synergistic governance combined with long-term engineering practice and typical cases. It is pointed out that the scope of the mining area should include the areas of ecological damage and the areas with direct influence of environmental pollution, which is much larger than only the mine pit area. In this paper it is also put forward that the concept of mining complex should include natural resource subsystem, eco-environment subsystem and socio-economic subsystem. The differences and connections between land consolidation, vegetation recovery and ecological restoration are analyzed, and the definition and connotation of ecological restoration targets in mining areas are clarified based on the theory of synergistic governance and the concept of life community of Mountain-River-Forest-Farmland-Lake-Grass System. The targets of ecological restoration in mining areas include two responsible bodies including local government and mining enterprises for eco-environment governance, and three scales including mining complex, ecosystem and site. Finally, the patterns and characteristics of the ecological restoration in the mining area are proposed, including four categories:natural landscape similarity restoration mode, land reclamation and reuse mode, natural park construction mode and ecology-oriented development (EOD) mode. Among them, sustainable restoration modes include garden landscape, wetland park, green mine construction, geological relic protection, mine park construction, etc. Ecological security and the health of the human settlement environment in resource-based cities are the focal points in the construction of ecological civilization, this research gives the answers to the confusion in the scientific formulation of ecological restoration targets in mining areas, the synergistic governance of ecological restoration and environmental pollution, and the sustainable development of the region from the theoretical and practical levels, it is of great significance for classifying and promoting ‘ecological conservation and restoration based on natural solutions’, ‘integrated restoration of social-economic-natural complex ecosystems’ and ‘eco-environment supervision in mining areas’.

Key words: ecological restoration, target, mode, mining area, mine, synergistic governance