Application of payment for ecosystem services in China’s rangeland conservation initiatives: a social-ecological system perspective
Yanbo Li A B , Mingming Fan B and Wenjun Li B C
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A Institute of International Rivers and Eco-Security, Yunnan University, Kunming 650091, China.
B Department of Environmental Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
C Corresponding author. Email: wjlee@pku.edu.cn
The Rangeland Journal 37(3) 285-296 https://doi.org/10.1071/RJ14014
Submitted: 27 January 2014 Accepted: 22 March 2015 Published: 8 May 2015
Abstract
The Chinese government has adopted Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) as a main approach for preventing or restoring rangelands perceived as undergoing degradation on a massive scale. Using the PES project, known as the ‘retire livestock, restore rangeland’ project in Alxa of Inner Mongolia as an example, the long-term ecological consequences of such projects is assessed, and the causes of the associated problems from the perspective of social-ecological system explored. Study findings demonstrate that PES, as used in the case study area, is unlikely to achieve the expected outcome of rangeland restoration in the long term. The root cause of such failure is that the PES approach focuses on end-point ecosystem services (outputs), while at the same time decoupling the feedbacks among social and ecological systems that are the key to generating such services. This drives the overall social-ecological system into an undesirable basin of attraction. It is concluded that a PES program for pastoral systems should aim to improve resilience of such a coupled social-ecological system to external shocks and changes, instead of simply maintaining ecological services without considering the origins of such services in the inter-relationship of humans and environment. It is argued that ‘Payment for Ecosystem Services’ should be displaced by ‘Payment for Social-ecological System Resilience’ in future policy discussions.
Additional keywords: Inner Mongolia, payment for ecosystem services, rangeland conservation, social-ecological system.
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