The Xiong'an New Area is a recently established state-level new area in Baoding, Hebei province, China. Green construction and development are the most important issues to be considered and must be given priority by area planners during forthcoming construction of the new area. Green ecological planning cannot be implemented without a clear understanding of an area's ecological status and an accurate prediction of an area's ecological status responding to forthcoming regional planning. Therefore, using Landsat images of 2004 and 2015, feature inversion and extraction techniques, and the remote sensing-based ecological index (RSEI), this study investigated changes in three main land cover types (impervious surface, vegetation, and water) in the Xiong'an New Area over the last 11 years from 2004 to 2015 and predicted the ecological and thermal effects responding to the upcoming regional construction on the new area. The results show that the areas of impervious surface, vegetation, and water covers have changed over the 11-year study period, but the change intensity was less than 5%. In addition, the ecological status was stable during the study period as the RSEI increased only slightly from 0.629 in 2004 to 0.639 in 2015. Therefore, the overall development intensity was relatively low, and the area's current ecological quality is good. Quantitative analysis indicates that the area of impervious surface has the strongest influence on both ecological quality and land surface temperature among the three main land cover types of the area. The area's ecological responses to upcoming regional planning were predicted using regression relationship models of RSEI and land surface temperature with the three main land cover types. The prediction, based on the known goal of population and area development, revealed that the increase of population to 2.5 million with a 25% of impervious surface cover in the new area would have noteworthy effects on regional ecological conditions, potentially decreasing the area's RSEI by 10 % and increasing land surface temperature by 1.1 ℃. Alternatively, if the proportion of impervious surface could be controlled within 20%, the area's RSEI would increase by 3.6%, and land surface temperature would decrease by 0.3 ℃.