The On Forest Ecosystem

Ecosystems have been extensifly modified and degraded under the interactions between humans and the environment. The degradation of ecosystems is further exacerbated by unintended human-induced environmental consequences such as climate oscillations, biodiversity loss, soil and water erosion and frequent natural hazards. The persistence of these global processes is hindering the provision of ecosystem goods and services that contniously support human society and well-being. To enhance environmental sustainability and safeguard long-lasting development, Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) has been designed and increasingly incorporated into environmental policies, particularly in mountainous regions where many of the adversities exist.

The PES approach has been embedded as a key component in large conservation efforts around the world, such as the well-known project on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation or REDD+. In many cirsumstances, payments are made to participants such as smallholders in under-developed regions through changing their socio-economic activities to strengthen (or at least secure) the provision of ecosystem services undergirded by the ecosystem.

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In the late 1990s, China launched a bunch of ecological policies to reinforce its efforts for forest ecosystem protection and rehabilitation after a long history of overexploitation of forest resources. These policy practices substantially catalyzed and even accelerated the forest transition (i.e., halting forest loss and facilitating forest regeneration) in China, and the associated favorable outcomes have been well documented.

For instance, research revealed that China’s ecological restoration projects contributed to 56% of the total carbon sink nationwide during the last decade of 2001-2010; the increase in forest cover and forest growth has rendered China, together with India, lead the greening trend of the terrestrial world in the past two decades.

Among these policies, the Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP)[footnoteRef:1] has received the greatest attention by scholars, policy-makers and other relevant stakeholders. The CCFP can be viewed as a public PES program, as it incentivizes rural farmers to retire some of their ecologically vulnerable croplands for forest restoration with financial or in-kind compensations. The program mainly targets smallholders in low-income mountainous areas where cropland are prone to soil erosion, carrying a side goal of making rural poverty less severe.

Up to 2016, the program has invested totally $45 billion to “retire” and afforest 30 million ha of farmland and degraded land, touching upon about 17% of the rural population (or over 30 million households) in China. [1: We prefer using conversion of cropland to forest to grain-for-green or sloping land conversion, although the latter two are also commonly adopted in the literature. First, the government compensated participants with in-kind support such as grains only in the first year of implementation, but switched it to cash in the following years to minimize transaction costs; thus, grain-for-green does not apply for the cash payment. Second, in some regions, the program targeted not only slopnig lands but also lands with high risks of soil erosions but moderately slopes; hence, the term sloping does not apply in some regions.

In summary, CCFP can best describe the characteristics of the program.] Despite the enormous conservation investments and their ecological gains, the long-term success of PES programs such as the CCFP relies largely on the extent to which smallholders change their livelihood behaviors in a sustainable way. The CCFP offers a unique opportunity for investigating policy consequences in the socioeconomic and demographic dimensions. The implementation of the CCFP directly involves land-use conversion from croplands to forests, which potentially influences household labor allocation between farm and non-farm activities and subsequently their dependence on ecosystems. Meanwhile, the payment is designed to partially offset the costs of the forgone value of farming crops, to which participating households need to adapt by diversifying income sources.

Since participants continue to have full usufruct rights to the growing trees planted on their former cropland parcels (and the land as well), they might revert the recently reforested land back to cropland after the government compensation ends if they do not pursue better livelihood options. Under this circumstance, the ecosystem services would less likely to be secured by the landholders. Therefore, policy-makers expect participating households to seek and sustain alternative livelihoods during the compensation years so that the provision of ecosystem services will last after the compensation ends.

Labor out-migration has been an essential livelihood strategy for income diversification in China, particularly in mountainous areas where croplands were extensively enrolled in the CCFP. Households sending out migrants often expect to receive remittances to alleviate pressures on scarce resources, which is also one of the “push” forces making people move away from harsh conditions. Neverthless, the reduction in farm labor due to out-migration may weaken security of land tenure claims by the households. In this regard, continuing out-flows of labor migrants are likely to have profound effects on the well-being of the origin households, as well as the extent to which the households extract natural capital such as forest resources from the ecosystem.

For example, Oldekop et al. (2018) detected forest recovery during 2000-2010 in Nepal and explained the transition as driven mainly by demographic changes, emphasizing an unignorable effect of labor outmigration on ecosystems. Thus, the decision-making processes of migration for households is critical to the social-ecological sustainability in terms of preserving forest ecosystems and enhancing socioeconomic development. Scholars have discussed strong and complex associations between environmental changes and demographic dynamics. Similarly, researchers have observed strong associations between the CCFP and labor migration in China, which in a long term complicate socioeconomic consequences and ecological conservation effectiveness.

Evidence from previous studies supported that the CCFP in some regions may have positive effects on non-farm employment, including out-migration, with potentially increased income. The mechanisms probably include relaxation of liquidity constraints or labor transfer from farm to nonfarm activities. Meanwhile, these PES-induced behavioral changes can be accompanied with other socioeconomic changes for participants, such as diversified livelihoods, change in income inequality, and improved household productivity. In other regions, however, mixed results have been obtained. A study found that the CCFP in western regions may not be as effective as expected in farm labor transfer to non-farm employment.

One primary reason is that the CCFP-livelihoods relationship is often complex and context-specific, leading towards multiple social-ecological pathways across geographic regions. This study aims to examine whether and how regional differences shape the socioeconomic and ecological outcomes of PES using the case of the CCFP in China. The investigation is designed to cover two areas with distinct geographic conditions, one in the subtropical mountainous region and the other in the semi-arid Loess Plateau. As the CCFP has concluded the first round of payments and advanced to the second phase, it is especially crucial to evaluate its performances regarding labor out-migration, which is a socioeconomic process with long-term implications for reforestation sustainability and ecosystem rehabilitation.

This research integrates household survey data and remotely sensed satellite images to answer the following question: how do contextual factors in different geographic regions influence the migration decisions for rural households and subsequent ecological outcomes of forest regeneration? Specific objectives include statistically comparing migration characteristics between the two regions, modeling migration decision-making processes with regional differences taken into account, exploring associations between migration and forest restoration, and finally uncovering social-ecological pathways of paying for conserving ecosystem services.