China’s grassland ecological compensation policy achieves win-win goals in Inner Mongolia

Abstract

Approximately 10% of China’s grasslands are severely degraded and 90% of them are overgrazed. To protect ecosystems and boost human well-being, payments for ecosystem services programs have been implemented to generate win-win outcomes for both pastoralists and the grasslands. Taking a payment for ecosystem services program in Damao County, Inner Mongolia as an example, our study evaluated the ecological effects of the Grassland Ecological Compensation Policy (GECP) based on historical trend at the pixel, parcel, and county levels. We also evaluated the socioeconomic effects of GECP using both objective and subjective well-being at the household level. Our results show that: (1) at the pixel level, the percentages of additionally increased Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Net Primary Production (NPP) were 93.4% and 93.3% after GECP implementation, corresponding to the average additional effects of 0.08 and 58.99 g C/m2, respectively. At the parcel level, the GECP additionally increased NDVI between 0.02-0.17 (average of 0.08) and increased NPP between 28.36-115.15 (average of 60.30) g C/m2, respectively. At the county level, the GECP additionally increased grassland NDVI and NPP by 0.07 (~3.4% annually) and 53.63 g C/m2 (~4.5% annually) from 2008 to 2020, respectively; and (2) the GECP implementation significantly improved pastoralists’ objective well-being (P < 0.01) while the effects on subjective well-being indices were mixed. Our results also show that GECP effects on objective and subjective well-being significantly differ from households with large rangeland to those with small rangeland. We further discussed the experience, challenges, and opportunities of GECP. The long-term sustainability of GECP, particularly socioeconomic sustainability, still remains challenging and relies on guiding pastoralists to find alternative livelihoods. For future research and policy improvement, we call for the establishment of a better policy compensation mechanism that jointly considers the ecological effectiveness, economic efficiency, and social equity.

Exploring the Heterogeneities in the Impacts of China’s Grassland Ecological Compensation Program

“…We detected a positive ATT in 19 counties and a negative ATT in 27 counties (Table 1). Our finding that the average annual NDVI of grassland in most of the counties where the GECP has been implemented had increased since the implementation of the policy (Figure 2) is consistent with the findings in the literature [25,30,53]. The average annual Land 2024, 13, 132 8 of 11 NDVI of grassland had decreased on the eastern border of the Tibetan Plateau, in western Inner Mongolia, and in northern Xinjiang, where human activities tend to be relatively intensive [26,54].…”

“…Studies on the GECP have mostly focused on the impacts of the program on the spatial and temporal dynamics of grasslands, and on the socioeconomic status of the participants. These studies measured grassland status using metrics such as grassland area, grass yield, net primary productivity (NPP), and Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) [25,26]. A few studies that evaluated the socioeconomic impact of the GECP measured the income of people in the area where the program has been implemented [27,28].…”

Considering Climatic Factors, Time Lag, and Cumulative Effects of Climate Change and Human Activities on Vegetation NDVI in Yinshanbeilu, China

“…The response of surface vegetation to ecological projects has a certain lag [64] and is also negatively affected by the development of urbanization. With the full implementation of the national ecological projects, large areas of sloping cultivated land and barren hills and wasteland were converted to forests and grasslands, and the effect of vegetation restoration gradually became obvious [65,66]; therefore, the human activities in the later part of the study period had a predominantly positive effect on the changes in NDVI, and the degree of the effect showed a significantly higher trend, which is basically in line with the results of Zhou et al [67] and Zhao et al [68].…”