It is not too hard to argue for
the effective application of sound woodlot husbandry. In fact my very first posts on this blog
targeted just that topic.
The difficulty has been to arrange
a successful economic model around it all as has ever been the case. Quite simply, effort applied today is seen to
reap a benefit long past the operator’s life span and he has no incentive that
is creditable. It thus becomes necessary
for the local government to actively participate in the process since they will
in fact benefit from the product decades into the future.
Once that is accepted, and it
must be, then it is not too difficult to set protocols in place along with
appropriate rewards that achieve the long term goals. Again we made similar arguments in the past.
I simply argued that local
government needed to assume a fifty percent share in any harvest and to then
mildly subsidize woodlot management through simply paying for brush clearing
and windfall recovery which can be even self supporting as the lot matures.
Here we have an example of the
same sort of problem been successfully tackled.
The take home is that common sense will prevail over sufficient time as economic health steadily improves. All this is obvious, and it is been made to happen everywhere sooner or later. Intervention is helpful but not critical if one is prepared to wait a while.
Reforesting rural lands in China
by Donna Hesterman
An innovative program to encourage sustainable farming in rural China has helped restore eroded forestland while producing economic gains for many farmers, according to a new study by Stanford University researchers.
Their findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy
"The Sloping Land Conversion Program, which began in 2000 after
massive flooding caused in part by land clearing, focuses on China's largest
source of soil erosion and flood risk - farms on steep slopes," said study
co-author Gretchen Daily, a professor of biology at Stanford.
The program aims to return more than 37 million acres of cropland on
steep slopes back to forest or grassland. The government pays villagers in
varying amounts of cash and rice to give up farming and find new sources of
employment.
"It's a tremendously innovative program designed to address two
critical problems - securing the environment and providing economic opportunities
for people in rural, desperately poor areas," said Daily, a senior fellow
at the Woods Institute for the Environment and co-director of the Natural
Capital Project at Stanford.
Natural capital
The Natural Capital Project has developed a software tool called InVEST that is helping the Chinese government decide where to focus conservation and restoration efforts, based on the potential return-on-investment for society in the form of ecosystem services such as water purification and biodiversity conservation.
"We can think of these life-support services as flowing from
natural capital, like forests and wetlands, which provide very tangible,
financially valuable services," said Daily.
"Forests soak up tremendous amounts of water, filter it and
release it gradually into rivers and streams that we use for drinking water,
hydroelectric power and growing crops." In many ways, the environment can
help mitigate damage from floods and even human disasters, like oil spills, she
added.
China's land conversion program has its roots in the late 1960s, when
farmers in the mountainous western provinces began clearing vast stretches of
land to make way for more crops. The increased agricultural production helped
feed a growing nation but also set the scene for disaster.
When record monsoon rains pelted the region in 1998, soil from the
agricultural fields washed down the mountain slopes, killing thousands of
people in the villages below.
The unprecedented damage caused by the floods prompted China
In the PNAS study, Daily and colleagues from Stanford and Xi'an Jiaotong
University
The study is one of the first to assess whether this major government
effort has reached its twin objectives of improving the environment and lifting
people from poverty in rural mountain regions.
A passing grade
Ecologically speaking,
But economically, the benefits have been less pronounced, according to
Jie Li of Xi'an Jiaotong's School
of Public Policy and Administration in
China
On average, families that participated in the program reported doing
better financially than those who did not, but some farm workers had trouble
finding new work, according to the study.
Households that profited most did so by sending a husband-and-wife team
into the city to earn money as unskilled laborers. The wages they earned in the
city combined with the government subsidy easily topped what they had earned as
farmers.
But not all families were able to send both parents to the city,
because they had no one to care for their child while they were away.
"In many cases, it came down to whether or not the grandparents
lived with the family and were available to look after the couple's one, maybe
two, children," said study co-author Marc Feldman, professor of biology
and director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies at
Stanford.
Fine-tuning
The researchers' evaluation of the sloping land conversion program has provided feedback to the Chinese government that will be used to fine-tune the system for calculating subsidy payments in the future, said Daily. For example, some families may require bigger subsidies or other assistance, like special permission to enroll their children in city schools where they work.
"It's highly unusual for any government to check the effectiveness
of a program like this so rigorously," said Daily. "We're fortunate
to have an opportunity to evaluate an operation of this magnitude and learn
lessons for other parts of the world."
Last October, Daily witnessed the scope of the flooding problem
firsthand. She and her research team were assessing forest habitat on the
tropical island province
of Hainan
roads and in towns," she recalled. But in a nearby natural forest
reserve, where she'd been just 12 hours earlier, the water was perfectly clear.
"So many people died in those floods or lost everything they
owned," she said. "The importance of protecting these ecosystems has
always resonated with me on an intellectual level, but this hit me on an
emotional level."
For China
The Natural Capital Project is a collaboration among the Woods
Institute for the Environment, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund
and the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment. The study was
also co-authored by Shuzhuo Li of Xi'an Jiaotong University
This article was written by Donna Hesterman, a science-writer intern at
the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford.
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