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Spatial characteristics of degraded land and their implications to the design and implementation of landscape restoration programs: West China as an example
Forest Policy and Economics 107 (2019) 101925
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Spatial characteristics of degraded land and their implications to the design and implementation of landscape restoration programs: West China as an example☆
T
Daojun Zhanga, Runsheng Yina,b,
⁎
a b
College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China Department of Forestry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Forest landscape restoration Spatial fragmentation and variation Market-based mechanisms Payments for ecosystem services Voluntary participation
The spatial dimension of PES programs has not been well recognized. This study aims to reveal the spatial characteristics of degraded or deforested land, using west China as an example, and elucidate how best to design and implement restoration efforts in order to improve the ecosystem conditions and functions. Using satellite imagery and geospatial tools, we first showed, among other things, how the land tracts are tiny and fragmented and how variable the slope steepness and ownership pattern are in the Wugucheng watershed. Then, we addressed the questions of why landscape planning and implementation of restoration practices is needed and how landscape planning and implementation can go hand in hand with market-based mechanisms of restoration contracts bidding and local voluntary participation.
1. Introduction There have been great international interests and efforts in promoting payments for ecosystem services (PES) as a novel, incentivebased approach to providing ecosystem services (MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment), 2005; Daily and Matson, 2008; Arriagada and Perrings, 2011). Meanwhile, there remains a lack of concrete and practical inquiry into how to adopt and implement market-based mechanisms and measures in conserving, rehabilitating, and managing ecosystems (Pascual et al., 2010; Miteva et al., 2012). In particular, the spatial dimension of PES programs has not been well recognized, let alone appropriately incorporated into the design and implementation of market-based mechanisms and measures (Yin et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2019). Most of the discussions on PES have not been spatially explicit (Wunder et al., 2008; Pascual et al., 2010), which is not conducive to the requirements of restoring deforested or degraded landscapes. And it appears that even ecologists, who emphasize that restoration should be carried out at the landscape scale “to achieve the most cost-effective results to maximize ecosystem services and biodiversity gains” (Menz et al., 2013), have not fully come to terms with the real-world conditions in their articulation. China's experience indicates that the degraded landscapes, be they
cropland, grassland, forestland, or wetland, tend to be tiny and often scattered tracts owned by households and other entities. For instance, in Sichuan one family had only 1/3 ha (ha) and in Shaanxi one ha enrolled in the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) in 2008, which is the largest PES program in the developing world (Yin and Yin, 2010). Another estimation, based on a 2011 survey of 182 households in Wuqi—a county that has retired the largest proportion of degraded cropland in Shaanxi, further demonstrates that even there the average enrollment was only 2.2 ha per household in 3.8 plots; the maximum number of individual parcels a household had in the program was as large as 13 (Liu et al., 2019). This is in stark contrast to the condition of the U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), for example, where the contract size averaged 30.4 ha and the mean sign-up amount was 44.8 ha per farm as of July 2014 (Stubbs, 2014). As such, it is more appropriate to construe ecosystem service (ES) provision and bidding contracts at the farm level in the U.S. (Hellerstein, 2017). In China, on the other hand, it seems impossible to execute a bidding process or to achieve a necessary degree of ecological integrity at the household level given the tiny and scattered amounts of the retired cropland and grassland that are owned by a multitude of households and communities. Notably, this kind of spatial fragmentation and heterogeneity and its implications go way beyond what has been addressed
This article is part of a special issue entitled. “Governing our forests: The evolving political economy of multiple values and multiple stakeholders” published at the journal Forest Policy and Economics 107C, 2019. ⁎ Corresponding author at: College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China. E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Yin). ☆
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.05.011 Received 18 March 2018; Received in revised form 31 March 2019; Accepted 13 April 2019 Available online 10 May 2019 1389-9341/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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in the literature under such general notions as “spatial variation,” “spatial configuration,” or “spatial planning” (Banerjee et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2015). Nonetheless, this kind of spatial fragmentation and heterogeneity makes it imperative to adopt landscape-level restoration designing and implementation. As argued in the Bonn Challenge, “Forest landscape restoration (FLR) is the ongoing process of regaining ecological functionality and enhancing human well-being across deforested or degraded forest landscapes. FLR is more than just planting trees—it is restoring a whole landscape to meet present and future needs and to offer multiple benefits and land uses over time…”.1 Of course, FLR can be done only by involving entire watersheds, jurisdictions, or even countries in which many land uses interact. The purpose of this study is to reveal how spatially fragmented and heterogeneous the typical degraded landscapes in west China look like and discuss what they mean for effective design and implementation of PES programs, especially restoring deforested or degraded landscapes. Of course, we argue that this situation of spatial fragmentation and heterogeneity is prevalent in many parts of the world with high population densities, including countries like India, Mexico, and Indonesia (MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment), 2005). At a time when the international community is pursuing ambitious goals of forest landscape restoration,2 therefore, it is essential and timely to better identify the fundamental characteristics of the deforested or degraded landscapes to be restored and to explore how to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of FLR. To our knowledge, Polasky et al. (2014) are among the few studies that have brought up the subject matter. They pointed out that “Provision of ES often depends on the spatial configuration of land use and coordination among multiple private landowners… Optimal land use decisions are interdependent.” Nonetheless, these authors drew their insight mainly from the American experience, which, as we have already highlighted, may not reflect adequately the conditions of degraded landscapes elsewhere and thus the solutions they prescribed may not be very relevant or effectual. It is hoped that our study will fill this salient gap in the literature and stimulate the deliberation of more realistic and better-targeted PES policy and landscape restoration. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we outline our research material and methods—how to couple spatial data derived from using satellite imagery and geospatial tools and land use information coming from a community survey. In section 3, we present our main findings based on the multiple datasets. In section 4, we discuss the implications of our analysis to the design, implementation, and evaluation of PES. Finally, some concluding remarks follow in section 5.
the country (Li et al., 2015). Then, a regional digital elevation map (DEM) with a resolution of 12 m × 12 m was obtained, from which a representative watershed identified (see Fig. 2). The principles we followed in identifying the watershed include that its size is large enough to feature a reasonable landscape for restoring ecological integrity and functionality but not too large to lead to a huge amount of data-generation work. In our judgment, at a smaller scale, the likelihood of maintaining ecological integrity and the feasibility of ES provision becomes significantly diminished (Yin et al., 2013). The selected watershed amounts to an area of over 546.95 ha in Wugucheng Township, covering three natural villages—Zhuangke, Liqu, and Fengsi. Using ArcGIS 10.5, we were able to generate the elevations, slopes, and aspects of the watershed from the DEM. Next, Landsat satellite images for the watershed at two points of time—1998 and 2012—were obtained and processed. The land uses were classified at a resolution of 30 m × 30 m, with the commonly used system of six classes—farmland, forestland, grassland, built-up land, water body, and unused (or unusable) land (Shi et al., 2017). Whenever available, Google Earth with a resolution of 0.5 m × 0.5 m was used to verify, validate, and supplement the classified land-use and land-cover data. For the same purpose, also, ground-truthing was pursued in multiple field visits. Finally, the basic land features, including the boundaries, sizes, cover types of individual tracts, were delineated by overlaying the processed land-use data on the DEM, so that the spatial patterns of land use was determined. Once the individual tracts were determined, we shared the land-use map with the local communities and asked them to identify the owners of all the tracts and to tell our research team what the tracts were used for back in the late 1990s and whether and when individual households participated in the SLCP or another program of restoring degraded farmland and grassland. If there are multiple owners in an identified tract, it is necessary to split it into multiple smaller tracts of individual owners. This effort enabled us to obtain information regarding: (1) the land ownership structure of the watershed—where and how much of the land is held by individual households or villages; (2) the land-use changes over the 15 years of our data (1998–2012); and (3) the extent to which the degraded farmland, grassland, and unused (or unusable) land were restored. 3. Main findings First, let us look at the basic makeup of the watershed. As show in Fig. 3, the Wugucheng watershed in Wuqi has a total area of 546.95 ha in 531 tracts. The average tract size is only 1.03 ha, with the smallest being less than 0.01 ha and the largest 27.20 ha. The slope ranges from 3.7°to 37.5°, averaging 19.1°. The elevation varies from 1350 m to 1615 m, with a mean of 1486 m. In combination, these statistics indicate that the landscape is indeed very fragmented and the tracts are generally very small. As summarized in Table 1 below, of the six classes of land use, forestland increased from 235.21 ha in 1998 to 440.43 in 2012, accounting for 80.5% of the whole watershed. During the same time period, farmland decreased from 131.19 ha to 46.46 ha, grassland decreased from 98.17 ha to 51.91 ha, and unused land decreased from 81.98 ha to 4.41 ha. Put differently, the local ecological restoration is predominantly reflected in the large gains in forestland from converting degraded farmland and grassland and tree planting on unused, often barren, land. These are remarkable changes in land uses, driven mostly by implementing the SLCP. Of the total area of the watershed (546.95 ha), the three villages hold 415.06 ha as common lands collectively (see Table 2), with the remaining 131.89 ha being owned by 58 households. In other words, a large majority of the watershed, especially those deep gullies and steep slopes, is held by the villages because their lack of accessibility as well as commercial value. Meanwhile, only a small portion of the watershed
2. Material and methods Our analysis has been done by coupling spatial data derived from satellite imagery using geospatial tools and land-use information gathered from a household/community survey in Wuqi county (see Fig. 1 for the location). The choice of Wuqi was based on our regional experience and knowledge (Yin, 2009). Located in the Loess Plateau region of northwest China, Wuqi is a national pioneering county of ecological restoration, where over 85% of the degraded cropland and grassland was restored under the SLCP (Yin et al., 2005). Also, Wuqi has a relatively large landholding per capita, which implies that if household-based bidding for and implementing of restoration practices is infeasible there due to the tiny and fragmented land holdings of individual households, it would certainly be less likely in other parts of 1
Source: http://www.bonnchallenge.org/content/forest-landscaperestoration. 2 The Bonn Challenge has urged the global community to bring 150 million ha of world's degraded land into restoration by 2020, and 350 million ha by 2030 (International Union of Conservation Networks (IUCN), 2012). 2
Forest Policy and Economics 107 (2019) 101925
D. Zhang and R. Yin
Fig. 1. Location of the study area.
belongs to individual households, and most of these private tracts have been retired from cropping and grazing, and planted to trees. Table 3 further indicates that of the 440.43 ha of forestland, 81.73 ha is owned by the 58 households. In many cases, each household has only one tract of forestland but the number of tracts a household has can be as many as seven. When a household has multiple tracts, they are not contiguous if the average distance between them is substantially larger than 0, which adds to the difficulty of implementing restoration projects based on the participation of households individually.
another kind of configuration (Yin et al., 2014). This in turn has profound implications for how to conceive and carry out the necessary restoration activities and how to assess the modified ecological conditions and ultimately ecosystem services. First, it is essential to pursue land-use planning and administration at the proper aggregate level that goes beyond the tracts individual households have and even the scope of a single village. Accordingly, targeting individual tracts in any restoration undertaking is inappropriate and futile. Coupled with the apparent spatial dependency of ecosystem service benefits (Polasky et al., 2014), large land blocks at the landscape level should be considered together in restoration because ecological impacts, determined by the integrity of ecosystem functions, must be accomplished as well as assessed at least at the watershed scale (Yin and Zhao, 2012). This in turn suggests that the use of the slope steepness (especially of individual tracts) as a criterion for selecting sites to be restored is misguided and inadequate (Yin et al., 2010). Second, the spatial fragmentation and ownership heterogeneity also imply that it is impractical to engage individual households directly with a particular restoration contract; they must be organized to bid for such a contract at the landscape level. Here, policymakers and practitioners must confront the question of how households and other local entities can be organized to participate in the contract bidding and thus restoration projects. In correspondence to implementing landscape-
4. Discussion Using Wufengcheng in Wuqi county as a study site, we have not only made the spatial dimension of the watershed explicit in the last section, but also identified a concrete set of its spatial characteristics including the small and fragmented tracts, and the variability in slope steepness and ownership pattern. The immediate question here is: What challenges do these characteristics pose to an FLR effort? Clearly, there can be a potential misalignment between the operational scales of such socioeconomic units as households and even villages and the appropriate ecological units. In other words, any effective restoration initiative seeking for an improved provision of ecosystem services can only be achieved at the landscape level, be it watershed, catchment, or 3
Forest Policy and Economics 107 (2019) 101925
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Fig. 2. A topographic map of the study area.
level projects, a bidding process for restoration contracts by community groups or intermediary aggregators must be structured and sought (Yin et al., 2014a, 2014b). In our case, the three villages and all the 58 households therein should be organized to participate in unison. This means that under such circumstances, it seems impractical to decouple conservation goals with poverty reduction in carrying out a PES program so that the pursuant of efficiency will not be compromised by the concern about equity (Kinzig et al., 2011). The combination of tiny plots of degraded land and rough terrains calls for the inclusion of all households in the target areas, regardless of their income status. Therefore, it is less likely, let alone appropriate, to decouple in China or, perhaps, many other counties. The above discussion also leads to the following concern: If landscape-level contract bidding and restoration planning must be undertaken, how can the participation by local households and communities be voluntary? Many other countries have relied primarily on voluntary payment programs to encourage soil conservation and other improvements in agri-environmental performance (Wunder et al., 2008). The U.S. CRP, for instance, features voluntary and competitive participation through farmer's bidding for conservation contracts (Stubbs, 2014). On
the other hand, quite a few scholars have viewed enrolling into the SLCP as quasi-voluntary at best (Uchita et al., 2009), based on a topdown approach under which no bidding was envisioned and uniform subsidies were practiced (Xu et al., 2006). While that concern is legitimate, our discussion above should not give currency to the top-down approach with a neglect of local interest and engagement. At the same time, it should be argued that landscapelevel planning and community collective participation does not necessarily violate the principle of voluntarism, so long as proper governance measures are taken for the local households and communities to work out a solution to the contract bidding and implementation in a democratic way. It can be imagined that a course of action will be undertaken based on a majority decision, while the interests of minority may be accommodated through certain internal channels (e.g., land swapping, differentiated compensation, and project assignment). Accordingly, bottom-up initiative, local knowledge, and internal enforcement will make the implemented restoration work more effective and its outcome more durable (Yin et al., 2013). In any case, it is through this bidding process that information on the restoration cost can be disclosed, so that the government will be 4
Forest Policy and Economics 107 (2019) 101925
D. Zhang and R. Yin
Fig. 3. Classified land use map.
5
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Table 1 Land use changes in Wugucheng watershed (1998–2012).
Table 3 Household landholding statistics in Wugucheng watershed (unit: ha).
Year
Farmland
Forestland
Grassland
Water Body
Built-up land
Unused land
1998 2012
131.19 46.46
235.21 440.43
98.17 51.91
0 0.46
0.41 3.28
81.98 4.41
Table 2 Community landholding statistics in Wugucheng watershed (unit: ha). Village name
No. of tracts
Smallest tract
Largest tract
Average size
Zhuangke Fengsi Liqu
10 6 216
0.2733 0.0549 0.0064
6.6248 6.8074 27.1982
1.4325 1.2256 1.8212
able to target payments for those watershed and landowner groups therein who can provide the optimal ecosystem benefits (Polasky et al. 2013). Notably, this process will also reduce the transaction costs on the government's part, as reflected in negotiating, administering, and monitoring contracts with individual households. Thus, it is certainly preferred to the bureaucratic order that determines which blocks of land to be enrolled, what restoration practices to be taken, how the households to be compensated, and what punishment to be imposed in case of compliance default. 5. Conclusions Our study was envisioned to reveal the spatial characteristics of degraded or deforested land in west China and to elucidate how best to design and implement restoration efforts in order to improve the ecosystem conditions and functions. Using satellite imagery and geospatial tools, we first showed, among other things, how the land tracts are tiny and fragmented and how variable the slope steepness and ownership pattern are in the Wugucheng watershed. Then, we addressed the questions of why landscape planning and implementation of restoration practices is needed and how landscape planning and implementation can go hand in hand with market-based mechanisms of restoration contracts bidding and local voluntary participation. We believe that the social-ecological phenomena we have observed are common but not well understood, and the ideas of restoration policy and practice we have proposed are novel and important. It is now clearer that large PES programs like the SLCP are intricate and challenging undertakings (Muradian et al., 2010; Yin and Zhao, 2012) and carrying them out entails long-term interactions of various components of the underlying social-ecological systems and lead to multiple, often mixed, and uncertain outcomes (Yin, 2009). Rather than characterizing them as voluntary, conditional transactions in abstract, it is more constructive to view them in terms of provisioning multiple environmental public goods on expansive spatial and temporal scales by a diversity of producers (Banerjee et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2015). This broader and more practical perspective has in turn enabled us to explore more effective means and mechanisms for conducting landscape restoration and provisioning ecosystem services. China's expanding portfolio of ecological restoration efforts—restoring degraded grassland, wetland, forestland, and waterways—can benefit from this kind of work (Chen et al., 2015; Hyde and Yin, 2019). Similarly, as more PES programs are launched worldwide (Daily and Matson, 2008; Porras et al., 2008), this kind of study can shed light on how to improve PES design and implementation in many other countries.
Household No.
No. of tracts
Smallest tract
Largest tract
Average size
Mean distance between tracts (m)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58
7 2 1 1 2 1 6 4 3 1 2 5 1 8 3 5 1 4 1 3 1 3 1 2 2 1 3 2 2 2 2 2 1 3 2 5 4 1 4 1 2 3 3 3 1 2 1 5 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 1 1
0.1144 0.1003 0.3956 0.2271 0.1813 0.3745 0.1051 0.1325 0.1709 1.6118 0.1685 0.0659 0.6151 0.1364 0.2376 0.2514 0.7030 0.2922 1.3726 0.2381 0.4853 0.2271 0.0345 0.2577 0.2381 0.0757 0.2528 0.0449 0.0632 0.2467 0.0584 0.4060 0.6270 0.9082 0.8906 0.3202 0.0611 1.3800 0.1422 0.7230 0.7536 0.3416 0.0641 0.2271 0.6265 1.0904 0.6231 0.2126 0.1595 0.0321 0.3690 0.5401 0.5563 0.2091 0.2271 0.5261 0.3976 0.2818
1.2819 0.7607 0.3956 0.2271 0.2936 0.3745 0.7053 0.5992 1.6118 1.6118 0.3234 0.2455 0.6151 1.4170 1.0671 0.8268 0.7030 1.3299 1.3726 1.6118 0.4853 0.7584 0.0345 1.7440 1.5202 0.0757 4.2677 1.4237 0.3044 0.7184 0.4479 0.4800 0.6270 1.3605 1.1365 1.8950 0.9082 1.3800 0.6755 0.7230 1.3926 1.8779 0.0748 1.6118 0.6265 2.1035 0.6231 0.8243 0.1595 0.0321 0.3690 0.9954 0.5563 0.7192 0.2271 0.5261 0.3976 0.2818
0.4180 0.4305 0.3956 0.2271 0.2374 0.3745 0.3925 0.4001 0.9488 1.6118 0.2460 0.1386 0.6151 0.5808 0.5940 0.4783 0.7030 0.6347 1.3726 1.0244 0.4853 0.4079 0.0345 1.0008 0.8791 0.0757 1.7217 0.7343 0.1838 0.4826 0.2531 0.4430 0.6270 1.0727 1.0136 0.9077 0.4580 1.3800 0.3830 0.7230 1.0731 0.8958 0.0686 0.7254 0.6265 1.5969 0.6231 0.4510 0.1595 0.0321 0.3690 0.7677 0.5563 0.4641 0.2271 0.5261 0.3976 0.2818
863.04 83.24 0.00 0.00 142.90 0.00 1083.40 192.75 674.97 0.00 671.09 59.41 0.00 146.14 257.99 197.98 0.00 310.19 0.00 616.79 0.00 264.35 0.00 90.35 282.06 0.00 707.54 101.98 69.31 687.61 704.83 1022.63 0.00 155.97 971.18 414.75 225.41 0.00 411.80 0.00 333.35 671.64 109.16 345.93 0.00 64.20 0.00 221.58 0.00 0.00 0.00 62.80 0.00 24.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Acknowledgments The authors are grateful for the comments and suggestions made by the reviewers and Professor Shashi Kant, the Guest Editor of this Special Issues. They also appreciate the comments and suggestions made by participants of the 4th New Frontiers of Forest Economics Conference held in Vancouver during August 14-17, 2018, and many of their international colleagues, including Bill Hyde, Jintao Xu, Yali Wen, and Can Liu. R.S·Y thanks the AgBioResearch and Center for Advanced 6
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Studies of International Development of Michigan State University, and Zhejiang A&F University for financial support, and Gang Lu and Victoria Hoelzer-Maddox for assistance.
Porras, I., Grieg-Gran, M., Neves, N., 2008. All That Glitters: A Review of Payments for Watershed Services. The International Institute for Environment and Development, London, UK. Shi, M.Y., Qi, J.G., Yin, R.S., 2017. Has China's natural forest protection program protected forests?—Heilongjiang's experience. Forests 7, 218. https://doi.org/10.3390/ f7100218. Stubbs, M., 2014. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP): Status and Issues. Congressional Research Service, Washington, DC. Uchita, E., Rozelle, S., Xu, J., 2009. Conservation payments, liquidity constraints, and off farm labor: impact of the grain-for-green program on rural households in China. Am. J. Agric. Econ. (1), 70–86. Wunder, S., Engel, S., Pagiola, S., 2008. Taking stock: a comparative analysis of payments for ecosystem services programs in developed and developing counties. Ecol. Econ. 65, 834–852. Xu, J.T., Yin, R.S., Liu, C., Li, Z., 2006. China's ecological rehabilitation: unprecedented efforts in uncharted territory. Ecol. Econ. 57, 595–607. Yin, R.S., 2009. An Integrated Assessment of China's Ecological Restoration Programs. Springer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Yin, R.S., Yin, G.P., 2010. China's primary programs of terrestrial ecosystem restoration: initiation, implementation, and challenges. Environ. Manag. 45, 429–441. Yin, R.S., Zhao, M.J., 2012. Ecological restoration programs and payments for ecosystem services as integrated social-ecological processes. Ecol. Econ. 73, 56–65. Yin, R.S., Yin, G.P., Li, L.Y., 2010. Assessing China’s Ecological Restoration Programs: What’s Been Done and What Remains to Be Done? Environmental Management 45 (3), 442–453. Yin, R.S., Zhao, M.J., Yao, S.B., 2014. Designing and Implementing Payments for Ecosystem Services Programs: What Lessons Can Be Learned from China’s Sloping Land Conversion. Program Environmental Science and Technology 48, 19–20. Yin, R.S., Xu, J.T., Li, Z., Liu, C., 2005. China's ecological rehabilitation: the unprecedented efforts and dramatic impacts of reforestation and slope protection in Western China. China Environ. Ser. 6, 17–32. Yin, R.S., Liu, T.J., Yao, S.B., Zhao, M.J., 2013. Designing and implementing payments for ecosystem services programs: lessons learned from China's cropland restoration experience. Forest Policy Econ. 35, 66–72. Yin, R.S., Liu, C., Zhao, M.J., Yao, S.B., Liu, H., 2014a. The implementation and impacts of China's largest payment for ecosystem services program as revealed by longitudinal household data. Land Use Policy 40, 45–55. Yin, R.S., Zhao, M.J., Yao, S.B., 2014b. Designing and implementing payments for ecosystem services programs: what lessons can be learned from China's sloping land conversion program. Environ. Sci. Technol. 48, 19–20. Zhao, M.J., Yin, R.S., Yao, L.Y., Xu, T., 2015. Assessing the impact of China's sloping land conversion program on household production efficiency under spatial heterogeneity and output diversification. China Agric. Econ. Rev. 7 (2), 221–239.
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Spatial characteristics of degraded land and their implications to the design and implementation of landscape restoration programs: West China as an example☆
T
Daojun Zhanga, Runsheng Yina,b,
⁎
a b
College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China Department of Forestry, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Forest landscape restoration Spatial fragmentation and variation Market-based mechanisms Payments for ecosystem services Voluntary participation
The spatial dimension of PES programs has not been well recognized. This study aims to reveal the spatial characteristics of degraded or deforested land, using west China as an example, and elucidate how best to design and implement restoration efforts in order to improve the ecosystem conditions and functions. Using satellite imagery and geospatial tools, we first showed, among other things, how the land tracts are tiny and fragmented and how variable the slope steepness and ownership pattern are in the Wugucheng watershed. Then, we addressed the questions of why landscape planning and implementation of restoration practices is needed and how landscape planning and implementation can go hand in hand with market-based mechanisms of restoration contracts bidding and local voluntary participation.
1. Introduction There have been great international interests and efforts in promoting payments for ecosystem services (PES) as a novel, incentivebased approach to providing ecosystem services (MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment), 2005; Daily and Matson, 2008; Arriagada and Perrings, 2011). Meanwhile, there remains a lack of concrete and practical inquiry into how to adopt and implement market-based mechanisms and measures in conserving, rehabilitating, and managing ecosystems (Pascual et al., 2010; Miteva et al., 2012). In particular, the spatial dimension of PES programs has not been well recognized, let alone appropriately incorporated into the design and implementation of market-based mechanisms and measures (Yin et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2019). Most of the discussions on PES have not been spatially explicit (Wunder et al., 2008; Pascual et al., 2010), which is not conducive to the requirements of restoring deforested or degraded landscapes. And it appears that even ecologists, who emphasize that restoration should be carried out at the landscape scale “to achieve the most cost-effective results to maximize ecosystem services and biodiversity gains” (Menz et al., 2013), have not fully come to terms with the real-world conditions in their articulation. China's experience indicates that the degraded landscapes, be they
cropland, grassland, forestland, or wetland, tend to be tiny and often scattered tracts owned by households and other entities. For instance, in Sichuan one family had only 1/3 ha (ha) and in Shaanxi one ha enrolled in the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) in 2008, which is the largest PES program in the developing world (Yin and Yin, 2010). Another estimation, based on a 2011 survey of 182 households in Wuqi—a county that has retired the largest proportion of degraded cropland in Shaanxi, further demonstrates that even there the average enrollment was only 2.2 ha per household in 3.8 plots; the maximum number of individual parcels a household had in the program was as large as 13 (Liu et al., 2019). This is in stark contrast to the condition of the U.S. Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), for example, where the contract size averaged 30.4 ha and the mean sign-up amount was 44.8 ha per farm as of July 2014 (Stubbs, 2014). As such, it is more appropriate to construe ecosystem service (ES) provision and bidding contracts at the farm level in the U.S. (Hellerstein, 2017). In China, on the other hand, it seems impossible to execute a bidding process or to achieve a necessary degree of ecological integrity at the household level given the tiny and scattered amounts of the retired cropland and grassland that are owned by a multitude of households and communities. Notably, this kind of spatial fragmentation and heterogeneity and its implications go way beyond what has been addressed
This article is part of a special issue entitled. “Governing our forests: The evolving political economy of multiple values and multiple stakeholders” published at the journal Forest Policy and Economics 107C, 2019. ⁎ Corresponding author at: College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China. E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Yin). ☆
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.forpol.2019.05.011 Received 18 March 2018; Received in revised form 31 March 2019; Accepted 13 April 2019 Available online 10 May 2019 1389-9341/ © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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in the literature under such general notions as “spatial variation,” “spatial configuration,” or “spatial planning” (Banerjee et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2015). Nonetheless, this kind of spatial fragmentation and heterogeneity makes it imperative to adopt landscape-level restoration designing and implementation. As argued in the Bonn Challenge, “Forest landscape restoration (FLR) is the ongoing process of regaining ecological functionality and enhancing human well-being across deforested or degraded forest landscapes. FLR is more than just planting trees—it is restoring a whole landscape to meet present and future needs and to offer multiple benefits and land uses over time…”.1 Of course, FLR can be done only by involving entire watersheds, jurisdictions, or even countries in which many land uses interact. The purpose of this study is to reveal how spatially fragmented and heterogeneous the typical degraded landscapes in west China look like and discuss what they mean for effective design and implementation of PES programs, especially restoring deforested or degraded landscapes. Of course, we argue that this situation of spatial fragmentation and heterogeneity is prevalent in many parts of the world with high population densities, including countries like India, Mexico, and Indonesia (MA (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment), 2005). At a time when the international community is pursuing ambitious goals of forest landscape restoration,2 therefore, it is essential and timely to better identify the fundamental characteristics of the deforested or degraded landscapes to be restored and to explore how to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of FLR. To our knowledge, Polasky et al. (2014) are among the few studies that have brought up the subject matter. They pointed out that “Provision of ES often depends on the spatial configuration of land use and coordination among multiple private landowners… Optimal land use decisions are interdependent.” Nonetheless, these authors drew their insight mainly from the American experience, which, as we have already highlighted, may not reflect adequately the conditions of degraded landscapes elsewhere and thus the solutions they prescribed may not be very relevant or effectual. It is hoped that our study will fill this salient gap in the literature and stimulate the deliberation of more realistic and better-targeted PES policy and landscape restoration. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we outline our research material and methods—how to couple spatial data derived from using satellite imagery and geospatial tools and land use information coming from a community survey. In section 3, we present our main findings based on the multiple datasets. In section 4, we discuss the implications of our analysis to the design, implementation, and evaluation of PES. Finally, some concluding remarks follow in section 5.
the country (Li et al., 2015). Then, a regional digital elevation map (DEM) with a resolution of 12 m × 12 m was obtained, from which a representative watershed identified (see Fig. 2). The principles we followed in identifying the watershed include that its size is large enough to feature a reasonable landscape for restoring ecological integrity and functionality but not too large to lead to a huge amount of data-generation work. In our judgment, at a smaller scale, the likelihood of maintaining ecological integrity and the feasibility of ES provision becomes significantly diminished (Yin et al., 2013). The selected watershed amounts to an area of over 546.95 ha in Wugucheng Township, covering three natural villages—Zhuangke, Liqu, and Fengsi. Using ArcGIS 10.5, we were able to generate the elevations, slopes, and aspects of the watershed from the DEM. Next, Landsat satellite images for the watershed at two points of time—1998 and 2012—were obtained and processed. The land uses were classified at a resolution of 30 m × 30 m, with the commonly used system of six classes—farmland, forestland, grassland, built-up land, water body, and unused (or unusable) land (Shi et al., 2017). Whenever available, Google Earth with a resolution of 0.5 m × 0.5 m was used to verify, validate, and supplement the classified land-use and land-cover data. For the same purpose, also, ground-truthing was pursued in multiple field visits. Finally, the basic land features, including the boundaries, sizes, cover types of individual tracts, were delineated by overlaying the processed land-use data on the DEM, so that the spatial patterns of land use was determined. Once the individual tracts were determined, we shared the land-use map with the local communities and asked them to identify the owners of all the tracts and to tell our research team what the tracts were used for back in the late 1990s and whether and when individual households participated in the SLCP or another program of restoring degraded farmland and grassland. If there are multiple owners in an identified tract, it is necessary to split it into multiple smaller tracts of individual owners. This effort enabled us to obtain information regarding: (1) the land ownership structure of the watershed—where and how much of the land is held by individual households or villages; (2) the land-use changes over the 15 years of our data (1998–2012); and (3) the extent to which the degraded farmland, grassland, and unused (or unusable) land were restored. 3. Main findings First, let us look at the basic makeup of the watershed. As show in Fig. 3, the Wugucheng watershed in Wuqi has a total area of 546.95 ha in 531 tracts. The average tract size is only 1.03 ha, with the smallest being less than 0.01 ha and the largest 27.20 ha. The slope ranges from 3.7°to 37.5°, averaging 19.1°. The elevation varies from 1350 m to 1615 m, with a mean of 1486 m. In combination, these statistics indicate that the landscape is indeed very fragmented and the tracts are generally very small. As summarized in Table 1 below, of the six classes of land use, forestland increased from 235.21 ha in 1998 to 440.43 in 2012, accounting for 80.5% of the whole watershed. During the same time period, farmland decreased from 131.19 ha to 46.46 ha, grassland decreased from 98.17 ha to 51.91 ha, and unused land decreased from 81.98 ha to 4.41 ha. Put differently, the local ecological restoration is predominantly reflected in the large gains in forestland from converting degraded farmland and grassland and tree planting on unused, often barren, land. These are remarkable changes in land uses, driven mostly by implementing the SLCP. Of the total area of the watershed (546.95 ha), the three villages hold 415.06 ha as common lands collectively (see Table 2), with the remaining 131.89 ha being owned by 58 households. In other words, a large majority of the watershed, especially those deep gullies and steep slopes, is held by the villages because their lack of accessibility as well as commercial value. Meanwhile, only a small portion of the watershed
2. Material and methods Our analysis has been done by coupling spatial data derived from satellite imagery using geospatial tools and land-use information gathered from a household/community survey in Wuqi county (see Fig. 1 for the location). The choice of Wuqi was based on our regional experience and knowledge (Yin, 2009). Located in the Loess Plateau region of northwest China, Wuqi is a national pioneering county of ecological restoration, where over 85% of the degraded cropland and grassland was restored under the SLCP (Yin et al., 2005). Also, Wuqi has a relatively large landholding per capita, which implies that if household-based bidding for and implementing of restoration practices is infeasible there due to the tiny and fragmented land holdings of individual households, it would certainly be less likely in other parts of 1
Source: http://www.bonnchallenge.org/content/forest-landscaperestoration. 2 The Bonn Challenge has urged the global community to bring 150 million ha of world's degraded land into restoration by 2020, and 350 million ha by 2030 (International Union of Conservation Networks (IUCN), 2012). 2
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Fig. 1. Location of the study area.
belongs to individual households, and most of these private tracts have been retired from cropping and grazing, and planted to trees. Table 3 further indicates that of the 440.43 ha of forestland, 81.73 ha is owned by the 58 households. In many cases, each household has only one tract of forestland but the number of tracts a household has can be as many as seven. When a household has multiple tracts, they are not contiguous if the average distance between them is substantially larger than 0, which adds to the difficulty of implementing restoration projects based on the participation of households individually.
another kind of configuration (Yin et al., 2014). This in turn has profound implications for how to conceive and carry out the necessary restoration activities and how to assess the modified ecological conditions and ultimately ecosystem services. First, it is essential to pursue land-use planning and administration at the proper aggregate level that goes beyond the tracts individual households have and even the scope of a single village. Accordingly, targeting individual tracts in any restoration undertaking is inappropriate and futile. Coupled with the apparent spatial dependency of ecosystem service benefits (Polasky et al., 2014), large land blocks at the landscape level should be considered together in restoration because ecological impacts, determined by the integrity of ecosystem functions, must be accomplished as well as assessed at least at the watershed scale (Yin and Zhao, 2012). This in turn suggests that the use of the slope steepness (especially of individual tracts) as a criterion for selecting sites to be restored is misguided and inadequate (Yin et al., 2010). Second, the spatial fragmentation and ownership heterogeneity also imply that it is impractical to engage individual households directly with a particular restoration contract; they must be organized to bid for such a contract at the landscape level. Here, policymakers and practitioners must confront the question of how households and other local entities can be organized to participate in the contract bidding and thus restoration projects. In correspondence to implementing landscape-
4. Discussion Using Wufengcheng in Wuqi county as a study site, we have not only made the spatial dimension of the watershed explicit in the last section, but also identified a concrete set of its spatial characteristics including the small and fragmented tracts, and the variability in slope steepness and ownership pattern. The immediate question here is: What challenges do these characteristics pose to an FLR effort? Clearly, there can be a potential misalignment between the operational scales of such socioeconomic units as households and even villages and the appropriate ecological units. In other words, any effective restoration initiative seeking for an improved provision of ecosystem services can only be achieved at the landscape level, be it watershed, catchment, or 3
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Fig. 2. A topographic map of the study area.
level projects, a bidding process for restoration contracts by community groups or intermediary aggregators must be structured and sought (Yin et al., 2014a, 2014b). In our case, the three villages and all the 58 households therein should be organized to participate in unison. This means that under such circumstances, it seems impractical to decouple conservation goals with poverty reduction in carrying out a PES program so that the pursuant of efficiency will not be compromised by the concern about equity (Kinzig et al., 2011). The combination of tiny plots of degraded land and rough terrains calls for the inclusion of all households in the target areas, regardless of their income status. Therefore, it is less likely, let alone appropriate, to decouple in China or, perhaps, many other counties. The above discussion also leads to the following concern: If landscape-level contract bidding and restoration planning must be undertaken, how can the participation by local households and communities be voluntary? Many other countries have relied primarily on voluntary payment programs to encourage soil conservation and other improvements in agri-environmental performance (Wunder et al., 2008). The U.S. CRP, for instance, features voluntary and competitive participation through farmer's bidding for conservation contracts (Stubbs, 2014). On
the other hand, quite a few scholars have viewed enrolling into the SLCP as quasi-voluntary at best (Uchita et al., 2009), based on a topdown approach under which no bidding was envisioned and uniform subsidies were practiced (Xu et al., 2006). While that concern is legitimate, our discussion above should not give currency to the top-down approach with a neglect of local interest and engagement. At the same time, it should be argued that landscapelevel planning and community collective participation does not necessarily violate the principle of voluntarism, so long as proper governance measures are taken for the local households and communities to work out a solution to the contract bidding and implementation in a democratic way. It can be imagined that a course of action will be undertaken based on a majority decision, while the interests of minority may be accommodated through certain internal channels (e.g., land swapping, differentiated compensation, and project assignment). Accordingly, bottom-up initiative, local knowledge, and internal enforcement will make the implemented restoration work more effective and its outcome more durable (Yin et al., 2013). In any case, it is through this bidding process that information on the restoration cost can be disclosed, so that the government will be 4
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D. Zhang and R. Yin
Fig. 3. Classified land use map.
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Table 1 Land use changes in Wugucheng watershed (1998–2012).
Table 3 Household landholding statistics in Wugucheng watershed (unit: ha).
Year
Farmland
Forestland
Grassland
Water Body
Built-up land
Unused land
1998 2012
131.19 46.46
235.21 440.43
98.17 51.91
0 0.46
0.41 3.28
81.98 4.41
Table 2 Community landholding statistics in Wugucheng watershed (unit: ha). Village name
No. of tracts
Smallest tract
Largest tract
Average size
Zhuangke Fengsi Liqu
10 6 216
0.2733 0.0549 0.0064
6.6248 6.8074 27.1982
1.4325 1.2256 1.8212
able to target payments for those watershed and landowner groups therein who can provide the optimal ecosystem benefits (Polasky et al. 2013). Notably, this process will also reduce the transaction costs on the government's part, as reflected in negotiating, administering, and monitoring contracts with individual households. Thus, it is certainly preferred to the bureaucratic order that determines which blocks of land to be enrolled, what restoration practices to be taken, how the households to be compensated, and what punishment to be imposed in case of compliance default. 5. Conclusions Our study was envisioned to reveal the spatial characteristics of degraded or deforested land in west China and to elucidate how best to design and implement restoration efforts in order to improve the ecosystem conditions and functions. Using satellite imagery and geospatial tools, we first showed, among other things, how the land tracts are tiny and fragmented and how variable the slope steepness and ownership pattern are in the Wugucheng watershed. Then, we addressed the questions of why landscape planning and implementation of restoration practices is needed and how landscape planning and implementation can go hand in hand with market-based mechanisms of restoration contracts bidding and local voluntary participation. We believe that the social-ecological phenomena we have observed are common but not well understood, and the ideas of restoration policy and practice we have proposed are novel and important. It is now clearer that large PES programs like the SLCP are intricate and challenging undertakings (Muradian et al., 2010; Yin and Zhao, 2012) and carrying them out entails long-term interactions of various components of the underlying social-ecological systems and lead to multiple, often mixed, and uncertain outcomes (Yin, 2009). Rather than characterizing them as voluntary, conditional transactions in abstract, it is more constructive to view them in terms of provisioning multiple environmental public goods on expansive spatial and temporal scales by a diversity of producers (Banerjee et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2015). This broader and more practical perspective has in turn enabled us to explore more effective means and mechanisms for conducting landscape restoration and provisioning ecosystem services. China's expanding portfolio of ecological restoration efforts—restoring degraded grassland, wetland, forestland, and waterways—can benefit from this kind of work (Chen et al., 2015; Hyde and Yin, 2019). Similarly, as more PES programs are launched worldwide (Daily and Matson, 2008; Porras et al., 2008), this kind of study can shed light on how to improve PES design and implementation in many other countries.
Household No.
No. of tracts
Smallest tract
Largest tract
Average size
Mean distance between tracts (m)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58
7 2 1 1 2 1 6 4 3 1 2 5 1 8 3 5 1 4 1 3 1 3 1 2 2 1 3 2 2 2 2 2 1 3 2 5 4 1 4 1 2 3 3 3 1 2 1 5 1 1 1 2 1 2 1 1 1 1
0.1144 0.1003 0.3956 0.2271 0.1813 0.3745 0.1051 0.1325 0.1709 1.6118 0.1685 0.0659 0.6151 0.1364 0.2376 0.2514 0.7030 0.2922 1.3726 0.2381 0.4853 0.2271 0.0345 0.2577 0.2381 0.0757 0.2528 0.0449 0.0632 0.2467 0.0584 0.4060 0.6270 0.9082 0.8906 0.3202 0.0611 1.3800 0.1422 0.7230 0.7536 0.3416 0.0641 0.2271 0.6265 1.0904 0.6231 0.2126 0.1595 0.0321 0.3690 0.5401 0.5563 0.2091 0.2271 0.5261 0.3976 0.2818
1.2819 0.7607 0.3956 0.2271 0.2936 0.3745 0.7053 0.5992 1.6118 1.6118 0.3234 0.2455 0.6151 1.4170 1.0671 0.8268 0.7030 1.3299 1.3726 1.6118 0.4853 0.7584 0.0345 1.7440 1.5202 0.0757 4.2677 1.4237 0.3044 0.7184 0.4479 0.4800 0.6270 1.3605 1.1365 1.8950 0.9082 1.3800 0.6755 0.7230 1.3926 1.8779 0.0748 1.6118 0.6265 2.1035 0.6231 0.8243 0.1595 0.0321 0.3690 0.9954 0.5563 0.7192 0.2271 0.5261 0.3976 0.2818
0.4180 0.4305 0.3956 0.2271 0.2374 0.3745 0.3925 0.4001 0.9488 1.6118 0.2460 0.1386 0.6151 0.5808 0.5940 0.4783 0.7030 0.6347 1.3726 1.0244 0.4853 0.4079 0.0345 1.0008 0.8791 0.0757 1.7217 0.7343 0.1838 0.4826 0.2531 0.4430 0.6270 1.0727 1.0136 0.9077 0.4580 1.3800 0.3830 0.7230 1.0731 0.8958 0.0686 0.7254 0.6265 1.5969 0.6231 0.4510 0.1595 0.0321 0.3690 0.7677 0.5563 0.4641 0.2271 0.5261 0.3976 0.2818
863.04 83.24 0.00 0.00 142.90 0.00 1083.40 192.75 674.97 0.00 671.09 59.41 0.00 146.14 257.99 197.98 0.00 310.19 0.00 616.79 0.00 264.35 0.00 90.35 282.06 0.00 707.54 101.98 69.31 687.61 704.83 1022.63 0.00 155.97 971.18 414.75 225.41 0.00 411.80 0.00 333.35 671.64 109.16 345.93 0.00 64.20 0.00 221.58 0.00 0.00 0.00 62.80 0.00 24.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Acknowledgments The authors are grateful for the comments and suggestions made by the reviewers and Professor Shashi Kant, the Guest Editor of this Special Issues. They also appreciate the comments and suggestions made by participants of the 4th New Frontiers of Forest Economics Conference held in Vancouver during August 14-17, 2018, and many of their international colleagues, including Bill Hyde, Jintao Xu, Yali Wen, and Can Liu. R.S·Y thanks the AgBioResearch and Center for Advanced 6
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Studies of International Development of Michigan State University, and Zhejiang A&F University for financial support, and Gang Lu and Victoria Hoelzer-Maddox for assistance.
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