Quantifying Ecological Well-Being Loss under Rural–Urban Land Conversion: A Study from Choice Experiments in China

Abstract

Rural-urban land conversion has led to the degradation of agricultural system ecological services, and therefore human ecological well-being. There is a need to transform the non-marketed value of ecosystem services provision into a monetary loss of ecological well-being in rural-urban land conversion, which could serve as a basis for ecological compensation. In this paper, a choice experiment method is adopted to investigate the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of rural and urban residents in six cities of three provinces selected from different regions in China. The results reveal that the attributes reflecting the ecological well-being of rural and urban residents are experiencing different degrees of decline. Two attributes, health and security, show the most obvious decline among all ecological well-being attributes for urban residents. In view of stakeholders, rural residents are facing a greater decline in ecological well-being than urban residents, which is mainly driven by their different linkages and interactions with the agro-ecosystem. In terms of regional comparisons, residents in the central region (Hubei Province) of China are subject to the sharpest decline in ecological well-being, followed by those living in the western region (Guizhou Province) and the eastern region (Guangdong Province). These differences are basically determined by their land resource conditions and socioeconomic circumstances. This paper argues that it is pressing to establish an ecological compensation mechanism to regulate rural-urban land conversion and maintain human ecological well-being.Sustainability 2020, 12, 3378 2 of 17 to provide various ES to human beings is gradually diminished, with the potential to further reduce human well-being [1,[9][10][11].Globally, it is one of the major challenges for policy-makers to keep a trade-off between economic development and agro-ecosystem protection. In most developing countries, especially in southern Africa and Asia, rapid urbanization and increasing human population are driving massive land transformation [12][13][14]. With the largest population and relatively scarce land resources, China has witnessed a significant growth in urbanization [15,16]. In recent years, ecological risks caused by rural-urban land conversion have attracted growing attention. The Central Government of the Communist Party of China (CPC) put forward the strategy of ecological civilization to reconcile the relationship between human and nature, taking "optimization of the spatial layout", "effective regulation of development scale", and "improvement of the ecology system" as main guidelines of future development mode. It is increasingly presenting not only as a response to eco-environment degradation in China but as a vision for our global future [17].Researchers have been sharing growing concerns about the impacts of rural-urban land conversion on agricultural ES and their impacts on human well-being. Several studies have adopted physical assessment methods [18][19][20] to uncover the relations between agri...

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