Nature-based solutions to China’s development challenges
Overview
While China’s remarkable industrial development has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and created a large middle class, it has also caused significant biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and pollution in urban and rural areas. These environmental crises threaten human health and safety and undermine long-term economic development.
In response, China’s government is now promoting a system of ecological civilization to align environmental conservation and socio-economic development through initiatives in natural capital investment, sustainable infrastructure, biodiversity protection and renewable energy. Notably, China has committed to establishing official protection over 30% of its land by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2060.
SCCEI is collaborating with the Stanford Natural Capital Project (NatCap) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences (RCEES) to advance nature-based policy solutions and support sustainable development in China and around the world. Our research focuses on four key areas: Ecological Civilization, Gross Ecosystem Product, Urban Nature and Health, and Nature and Rural Vitalization.
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Featured Projects
Ecological Civilization
Ecological Civilization, a new policy system in China, is designed to align environmental conservation with socio-economic development. Our research analyzes this emerging policy framework and identifies opportunities for collaboration with government, enterprises, and civil society.
Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP) is an index that aggregates the total value of ecosystem goods and services into a single monetary metric. Co-developed by NatCap and RCEES, GEP is now being piloted in China on local and national levels.
With over 1 billion people projected to live in China’s cities by 2030, the mental and physical health of the urban population has become a top priority. Our research identifies how nature solutions can improve public health outcomes, with a focus on the role of urban greenspace.
China’s rural countryside faces increasing needs for both environmental and economic investment. Our research aims to coordinate investments in natural capital with investments in human capital to transform China’s countryside into a frontier of sustainable development.
Despite broad interest in using payment for ecosystem services to promote changes in the use of natural capital, there are few expost assessments of impacts of payment for ecosystem services programs on ecosystem service provision, program cost, and changes in livelihoods resulting from program participation. In this paper, we evaluate the Paddy Land-to-Dry Land (PLDL) program in Beijing, China, and associated changes in service providers’ livelihood activities. The PLDL is a land use conversion program that aims to protect water quality and quantity for the only surface water reservoir that serves Beijing, China’s capital city with nearly 20 million residents. Our analysis integrates hydrologic data with household survey data and shows that the PLDL generates benefits of improved water quantity and quality that exceed the costs of reduced agricultural output. The PLDL has an overall benefit–cost ratio of 1.5, and both downstream beneficiaries and upstream providers gain from the program. Household data show that changes in livelihood activities may offset some of the desired effects of the program through increased expenditures on agricultural fertilizers. Overall, however, reductions in fertilizer leaching from land use change dominate so that the program still has a positive net impact on water quality. This program is a successful example of water users paying upstream landholders to improve water quantity and quality through land use change. Program evaluation also highlights the importance of considering behavioral changes by program participants.
As payment for ecosystem services (PES) programs proliferate globally, assessing their impact upon households’ income and livelihood patterns is critical. The Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) is an exceptional PES program, in terms of its ambitious biophysical and socioeconomic objectives, large geographic scale, numbers of people directly affected, and duration of operation. The SLCP has now operated in the poor mountainous areas in China for 10 y and offers a unique opportunity for policy evaluation. Using survey data on rural households’ livelihoods in the southern mountain area in Zhouzhi County, Shaanxi Province, we carry out a statistical analysis of the effects of PES and other factors on rural household income. We analyze the extent of income inequality and compare the socio-demographic features and household income of households participating in the SLCP with those that did not. Our statistical analysis shows that participation in SLCP has significant positive impacts upon household income, especially for low- and medium-income households; however, participation also has some negative impacts on the low- and medium-income households. Overall, income inequality is less among households participating in the SLCP than among those that do not after 7 y of the PES program. Different income sources have different effects on Gini statistics; in particular, wage income has opposite effects on income inequality for the participating and nonparticipating households. We find, however, that the SLCP has not increased the transfer of labor toward nonfarming activities in the survey site, as the government expected.
