Abstract: The protected areas established through Systematic Conservation Planning (SCP) play an important role in protecting the biodiversity resources and ecosystem services they provide. This paper sums up the emergence and development of SCP since the 1880s, and then sorts out the literature of SCP in the past 20 years to conclude that climate change and ecosystem services are the key backgrounds affecting SCP at this stage. The backgrounds have left a profound impact on the research trends of the key steps of the six-step SCP method and have promoted the emergence of new research progress, including the updating of the planning concepts, the diversification of protection objects, the expansion of data and model algorithms, and the change of the management framework. Taking into account of the background and related practices of China's protected area planning, the paper puts forward the future research directions from the three aspects of key contents, monitoring and evaluation, and implementation management, so as to provide reference for improving China’s protected area network construction by referring to the methods, tools and experience of international conservation planning.