Cost‐Effective Targeting Soil and Water Conservation: A Case Study of Changting County in Southeast China

Abstract

Soil erosion is by far the greatest cause of land degradation and other environmental and socio-economic problems in China. Although various conservation methods are widely utilized to reduce soil erosion and to sustain agricultural production, the cost-effectiveness and selection of these methods are less known. Using our survey and ecological data, this study evaluated four soil and water conservation methods in Changting County, Southeast China. The results show that the disparity of conservation costs is much larger than that of ecological benefits. Planting fruit trees is a kind of conservation through primarily economic development. Closing hillsides for afforestation is most costeffective, followed by forest fertilizing, and planting trees and grass. Our findings suggest that comparatively lower cost conservation methods, for example closing hillsides for afforestation, should be considered in priority if initial ecological conditions can meet the requirements of the method.

Anthropogenic and Biophysical Factors Associated with Vegetation Restoration in Changting, China

“…Under this policy, provinces provided annual compensation to individual households in areas that were experiencing the heaviest soil erosion. To compensate residents for their inability to harvest trees for fuel, subsidies were provided to farmers who stopped cutting vegetation [12,27]. Local governments also encouraged the development of animal husbandry and fisheries by providing compensation to residents, which are more sustainable alternatives to environmentally damaging activities such as tree harvesting and selling firewood and timber.…”

“…Vegetation cover can be affected by climate change, topographic and socio-economic factors [3][4][5][6][7], and a rapid change in vegetation cover can be triggered by environmental forces [8] and political change [9]. The causes of vegetation change have been researched extensively in many forested regions around the world [7,[10][11][12]. Vegetation is greatly influenced by the rapid change of population density, which usually leads to either negative or positive impacts.…”

Is the “Ecological and Economic Approach for the Restoration of Collapsed Gullies” in Southern China Really Economic?

“…Some research testified to the quantification of soil erosion values in terms of weight [23]. In order to evaluate the cost effectiveness of different conservation methods, we used cost efficiency to measure the cost of per unit soil erosion reduction in a period of one year [29]. The calculating process is as follows: first, using the total costs of new conservation methods in order to deduct the total rent of terrace duration (50 years) to get the net costs of treatment; second, the net costs per acreage, divided by soil erosion reduction in the period of one year, can be used to measure the cost efficiency of different conservation methods.…”

Land Cover Transition in Northern Tanzania

“…Currently, the terrace system is intensely used in the highland, on any land where the topographical conditions allow. The soil and water conservations techniques used in the farming systems have played an important role in the vegetation recovery by trapping the sediments and improving the soil water holding capacity, as evidenced by many studies (Das et al, 2014;Recha et al, 2014;Mekonnen et al, 2015b;Mekonnen et al, 2015a;Ndah et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2015). Loss of cropland to other cover classes was very weak, indicating that the fallow system and land abandonment were reduced, probably because of population increase, which is usually associated with high demand for arable land in the catchment (Enfors & Gordon, 2007).…”