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Application of payment for ecosystem services in China’s rangeland conservation initiatives a social

更新时间: 2015-10-09 编辑:
Application of payment for ecosystem services in China’s rangeland conservation initiatives a social
Yanbo Li,Mingming Fan,Wenjun Li
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 endpoint 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.

编辑：CZY

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