Ecosystem resilience is essential for maintaining the stability of ecosystem structure and function following disturbances. The decline in global ecosystem resilience introduces significant uncertainty to the sustainable management of ecosystems. However, little is known about the variation trends and influencing factors of ecosystem resilience in major ecological project areas in China. This study focuses on nine major ecological project areas in China, identifying the variation of ecosystem resilience based on the remote sensing vegetation index kNDVI and the autoregressive model coefficient AR(1), and analyzing the influencing factors of resilience using partial correlation analysis. The study shows that: (1) China's ecological project areas exhibit a corresponding pattern of high greenness-high resilience and low greenness-low resilience. Project areas with higher greenness tend to have higher resilience. The Sanjiangyuan Ecological Protection and Construction Project and the Beijing-Tianjin Sand Source Control Project exhibit relatively low greenness and low resilience. This spatial pattern underscores the strong association between vegetation cover and ecosystem resilience. (2) Since 2000, the greenness of major ecological project areas in China has shown an overall upward trend, while resilience has shown a fluctuating trend but overall decline, with resilience being at its lowest level since 1982 after 2015. This divergence highlights a growing risk of resilience degradation despite improvements in vegetation cover. (3) The response of ecosystem resilience in most ecological project areas to influencing factors such as precipitation variability, mean temperature, temperature variability, soil moisture, and total evapotranspiration is non-unique, with the proportion of positive and negative partial correlation coefficients being approximately equal. Mean precipitation is negatively correlated with AR(1), indicating that areas with abundant precipitation have stronger resilience. Soil moisture has a highest ratio of significant relation with AR(1). These results highlight the risk of continuous degradation of ecosystem resilience in China's ecological project areas, despite improvements in vegetation greenness. This underscores the need to incorporate ecosystem resilience as a core metric in ecological restoration assessments. Developing more effective, region-specific ecosystem management strategies that account for the complex and variable drivers of resilience will be essential to ensure the long-term sustainability of ecological restoration efforts.