Reforesting China Rewarding

It is not too hard to argue forthe effective application of sound woodlot husbandry.  In fact my very first posts on this blogtargeted just that topic.

The difficulty has been to arrangea successful economic model around it all as has ever been the case.  Quite simply, effort applied today is seen toreap a benefit long past the operator’s life span and he has no incentive thatis creditable.  It thus becomes necessaryfor the local government to actively participate in the process since they willin fact benefit from the product decades into the future.

Once that is accepted, and itmust be, then it is not too difficult to set protocols in place along withappropriate rewards that achieve the long term goals.  Again we made similar arguments in the past.

I simply argued that localgovernment needed to assume a fifty percent share in any harvest and to thenmildly subsidize woodlot management through simply paying for brush clearingand windfall recovery which can be even self supporting as the lot matures.

Here we have an example of thesame sort of problem been successfully tackled.

The take home is that common sense will prevail over sufficient time as economic health steadily improves.  All this is obvious, and it is been made to happen everywhere sooner or later. Intervention is helpful but not critical if one is prepared to wait a while.

Reforesting rural lands in China pays big dividends

by Donna Hesterman

Stanford CA(SPX) May 13, 2011

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Reforesting_rural_lands_in_China_pays_big_dividends_999.html

An innovative program to encourage sustainable farming in rural China hashelped restore eroded forestland while producing economic gains for manyfarmers, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers.

Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"The Sloping Land Conversion Program, which began in 2000 aftermassive flooding caused in part by land clearing, focuses on China's largestsource of soil erosion and flood risk - farms on steep slopes," said studyco-author Gretchen Daily, a professor of biology at Stanford.

The program aims to return more than 37 million acres of cropland onsteep slopes back to forest or grassland. The government pays villagers invarying amounts of cash and rice to give up farming and find new sources ofemployment.

"It's a tremendously innovative program designed to address twocritical problems - securing the environment and providing economic opportunitiesfor people in rural, desperately poor areas," said Daily, a senior fellowat the Woods Institute for the Environment and co-director of the NaturalCapital Project at Stanford.

Natural capital

The Natural Capital Project has developed a software tool called InVEST that ishelping the Chinese government decide where to focus conservation andrestoration efforts, based on the potential return-on-investment for society inthe form of ecosystem services such as water purification and biodiversity conservation.

"We can think of these life-support services as flowing fromnatural capital, like forests and wetlands, which provide very tangible,financially valuable services," said Daily.

"Forests soak up tremendous amounts of water, filter it andrelease it gradually into rivers and streams that we use for drinking water,hydroelectric power and growing crops." In many ways, the environment canhelp mitigate damage from floods and even human disasters, like oil spills, sheadded.

China's land conversion program has its roots in the late 1960s, whenfarmers in the mountainous western provinces began clearing vast stretches ofland to make way for more crops. The increased agricultural production helpedfeed a growing nation but also set the scene for disaster.

When record monsoon rains pelted the region in 1998, soil from theagricultural fields washed down the mountain slopes, killing thousands ofpeople in the villages below.

The unprecedented damage caused by the floods prompted Chinato reconsider the wisdom of replacing forests with farms - especially insteeply sloping terrain. In 2000, the government launched a campaign toreforest the countryside and established several large-scale programs to helpfarmers in the western provinces find new work in surrounding cities.

In the PNAS study, Daily and colleagues from Stanford and Xi'an Jiaotong University evaluated theland conversion program - one of the oldest and largest government projectsassociated with the reforestation push.

The study is one of the first to assess whether this major governmenteffort has reached its twin objectives of improving the environment and liftingpeople from poverty in rural mountain regions.

A passing grade

Ecologically speaking, China'sSloping Land Conversion Program has been a clearwin since it was implemented a decade ago, said Daily, noting that the programhas helped to decrease soil erosion by as much as 68 percent in some areas.

But economically, the benefits have been less pronounced, according toJie Li of Xi'an Jiaotong's Schoolof Public Policy and Administration inChina.He is the lead author of the PNAS study that assessed the economic effects ofthe land conversion program by analyzing the response to survey questions posedto 929 villagers in the western provinces.

On average, families that participated in the program reported doingbetter financially than those who did not, but some farm workers had troublefinding new work, according to the study.

Households that profited most did so by sending a husband-and-wife teaminto the city to earn money as unskilled laborers. The wages they earned in thecity combined with the government subsidy easily topped what they had earned asfarmers.

But not all families were able to send both parents to the city,because they had no one to care for their child while they were away.

"In many cases, it came down to whether or not the grandparentslived with the family and were available to look after the couple's one, maybetwo, children," said study co-author Marc Feldman, professor of biologyand director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies atStanford.

Fine-tuning

The researchers' evaluation of the sloping land conversion program has providedfeedback to the Chinese government that will be used to fine-tune the systemfor calculating subsidy payments in the future, said Daily. For example, somefamilies may require bigger subsidies or other assistance, like specialpermission to enroll their children in city schools where they work.

"It's highly unusual for any government to check the effectivenessof a program like this so rigorously," said Daily. "We're fortunateto have an opportunity to evaluate an operation of this magnitude and learnlessons for other parts of the world."

Last October, Daily witnessed the scope of the flooding problemfirsthand. She and her research team were assessing forest habitat on thetropical island province of Hainan when torrentialfloods swept through the region. The roads were already disappearing under awash of mud as the researchers made their way to the airport to escape therising waters.

roads and in towns," she recalled. But in a nearby natural forestreserve, where she'd been just 12 hours earlier, the water was perfectly clear.

"So many people died in those floods or lost everything theyowned," she said. "The importance of protecting these ecosystems hasalways resonated with me on an intellectual level, but this hit me on anemotional level."

For China,the devastating floods of 1998 were a wake-up call that caused people to thinkabout the value of natural ecosystems in a new way, she added. "I'mhopeful that we, too, will reconsider the value of our natural capital,especially in the wake of disasters like Katrina and the BP oil spill."

The Natural Capital Project is a collaboration among the WoodsInstitute for the Environment, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fundand the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment. The study wasalso co-authored by Shuzhuo Li of Xi'an Jiaotong University. Research was sponsored bythe China National Natural Science Fund, the Program for Changjiang Scholarsand Innovative Research Team in University, The Natural Capital Project and theMorrison Institute.

This article was written by Donna Hesterman, a science-writer intern atthe Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford.