A growing body of empirical evidence is revealing the value of nature experience for mental health. With rapid urbanization and declines in human contact with nature globally, crucial decisions must be made about how to preserve and enhance opportunities for nature experience. Here, we first provide points of consensus across the natural, social, and health sciences on the impacts of nature experience on cognitive functioning, emotional well-being, and other dimensions of mental health. We then show how ecosystem service assessments can be expanded to include mental health, and provide a heuristic, conceptual model for doing so.

In response to ecosystem degradation from rapid economic development, China began investing heavily in protecting and restoring natural capital starting in 2000. We report on China's first national ecosystem assessment (2000-2010), designed to quantify and help manage change in ecosystem services, including food production, carbon sequestration, soil retention, sandstorm prevention, water retention, flood mitigation, and provision of habitat for biodiversity. Overall, ecosystem services improved from 2000 to 2010, apart from habitat provision. China's national conservation policies contributed significantly to the increases in those ecosystem services.

China has responded to a national land-system sustainability emergency via an integrated portfolio of large-scale programmes. Here we review 16 sustainability programmes, which invested US$378.5 billion (in 2015 US$), covered 623.9 million hectares of land and involved over 500 million people, mostly since 1998. We find overwhelmingly that the interventions improved the sustainability of China's rural land systems, but the impacts are nuanced and adverse outcomes have occurred. We identify some key characteristics of programme success, potential risks to their durability, and future research needs. We suggest directions for China and other nations as they progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations' Agenda 2030.

Recent expansion of the scale of human activities poses severe threats to Earth’s life-support systems. Increasingly, protected areas (PAs) are expected to serve dual goals: protect biodiversity and secure ecosystem services. We report a nationwide assessment for China, quantifying the provision of threatened species habitat and four key regulating services—water retention, soil retention, sandstorm prevention, and carbon sequestration—in nature reserves (the primary category of PAs in China). We find that China’s nature reserves serve moderately well for mammals and birds, but not for other major taxa, nor for these key regulating ecosystem services. China’s nature reserves encompass 15.1% of the country’s land surface. They capture 17.9% and 16.4% of the entire habitat area for threatened mammals and birds, but only 13.1% for plants, 10.0% for amphibians, and 8.5% for reptiles. Nature reserves encompass only 10.2–12.5% of the source areas for the four key regulating services. They are concentrated in western China, whereas much threatened species’ habitat and regulating service source areas occur in eastern provinces. Our analysis illuminates a strategy for greatly strengthening PAs, through creating the first comprehensive national park system of China. This would encompass both nature reserves, in which human activities are highly restricted, and a new category of PAs for ecosystem services, in which human activities not impacting key services are permitted. This could close the gap in a politically feasible way. We also propose a new category of PAs globally, for sustaining the provision of ecosystems services and achieving sustainable development goals.

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Soil as the largest global carbon pool has played a great role in sequestering the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). Although global carbon sequestration potentials have been assessed since the 1980s, few investigations have been made on soil carbon sequestration (SCS) in China's cropland. China is a developing country and has a long history of agricultural activities. Estimation of SCS potentials in China's cropland is very important for assessing the potential measures to prevent the atmospheric carbon rise and predicting the atmospheric CO 2 concentration in future. After review of the available results of the field experiments in China, relationships between SCS and nitrogen fertilizer application, straw return and no-tillage (NT) practices were established for each of the four agricultural regions. According to the current agricultural practices and their future development, estimations were made on SCS by nitrogen fertilizer application, straw return and NT in China's cropland. In the current situation, nitrogen fertilizer application, straw return and zero tillage can sequester 5.96, 9.76 and 0.800 Tg C each year. Carbon sequestration potential will increase to 12.1 Tg C yr À1 if nitrogen is fertilized on experts' recommendations. The carbon sequestration potentials of straw return and NT can reach 34.4 and 4.60 Tg C yr À1 when these two techniques are further popularized. In these measures, straw return is the most promising one. Full popularization of straw return can reduce 5.3% of the CO 2 emission from fossil fuel combustion in China in 1990, which meets the global mean CO 2 reduction requested by the Kyoto Protocol (5.2%). In general, if more incentive policies can be elaborated and implemented, the SCS in China's cropland will be increased by about two times. So, popularization of the abovementioned agricultural measures for carbon sequestration can be considered as an effective tool to prevent the rapid rise of the atmospheric CO 2 in China.

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 benefitcost 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.social-ecological systems | sustainable household livelihoods | watershed management | sustainability | regional collaboration P ayment for ecosystem services (PES) can serve as an effective mechanism to translate external, nonmarket values of ecosystem services into financial incentives for local actors to provide such services (1), and has been highlighted as an innovative approach to integrate conservation and socioeconomic development (2-4). In principle, when the benefits derived from increased provision of ecosystem services exceed the cost of provision, PES mechanisms can make both ecosystem service beneficiaries and providers better off. Despite considerable promise and interest in the use of PES worldwide and increasing assessments of the benefits and costs of PES programs, there is little documentation of resulting changes in program participants' livelihoods. Livelihood changes can alter the total effect of a program through unintended changes in an area's economic structure or other natural capital assets (5-8). Taking stock of these socioeconomic impacts highlights the dynamic and distributional effects of PES programs, and is necessary for understanding the equity implications and overall efficiency of a program.Beijing faces a water crisis requiring urgent solutions, and PES programs are one strategy being used to protect water resources. The Miyun Reservoir is the only surface water source for domestic water in Beijing. Its main purpose is to supply...

[1] In many places around the world, panevaporation has been detected to decrease with the increase in temperature, which is known as the ''panevaporation paradox.'' An example of the paradox was found in the Haihe River Basin from 1957 to 2001. To explain the mechanism of the paradox, an approach to quantify the contributions of climate factors to the panevaporation trend has been proposed, in which the individual contribution was defined as the product of the partial derivative and slope of the trend for the concerned variables. Four variables, including temperature, wind speed, solar radiation, and vapor pressure, were selected based on the Penman-Monteith method to assess their individual contribution to the panevaporation trend. The results showed that an increase in temperature resulted in the increase of panevaporation, but this effect had been offset by an increase in vapor pressure and decrease in wind speed and solar radiation. Wind speed was the dominant factor contributing to panevaporation decreases in the Haihe River Basin.