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In addition to providing food, farming systems provide ecosystem services such as flood control, water quality control, carbon storage, and waste treatment, as well as cultural services such as scenic beauty, education, recreation, and tourism. However, the value of these services may conceal large costs that have been ignored by scholars. In this study, our goals were to perform a more complete cost–benefit analysis of farmland than has been done in previous research, thereby providing an improved estimate of the net benefits of that land use, and to explore the variation in the net benefits among regions. We used a novel method of quantifying costs and benefits that accounts for more of the associated costs than in previous research, and used China as an example. The annual net benefits of farmland totaled 11.8×1012 RMB (Renminbi: 1 RMB = US$0.15) in 2017, which amounts to 35.3% of the total national net benefit. However, due to the adverse effects of pesticide pollution and biodiversity reduction, agriculture has a potentially negative impact on sustainable development. The annual cost of farmland in China was 5.0×1012 RMB, which decreased the total benefit by 29.8%, and the annual cost of ecological protection was 1.1×1012 RMB. These results demonstrate the importance of a complete assessment of the costs and benefits of farmland to support more sustainable and economically efficient land‐use planning. This will both improve the benefits and support sustainable development of farmland, while also improving the enthusiasm of farmers for their occupation. Core Ideas: The net ecosystem services value can reveal the real benefits of an ecosystem.Evaluation of ecosystem service values provides important support for management of ecosystem.The net value is more practical than the payment for ecosystem services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decreasing vegetation cover leads to serious environmental problems, with negative impacts on human health and socioeconomic development. In recent years, these problems have seriously threatened human societies around the world. Although there have been many studies of urbanization's impacts on natural land cover, ecosystem health, and biodiversity, the effects of spatial variation of human factors and their interaction with climate factors are less well known, particularly in rapidly developing countries such as China. This makes it difficult to design effective ecological restoration policies because the lack of such research creates a high risk of misunderstanding the current situation and wasting a lot of money and labour. To provide some of the missing information, we used municipal‐ and county‐level data from China in 2017 to calculate the contributions of 14 factors that affect vegetation cover, which combine urbanization, socioeconomic development, and natural influences. We found significant regional differences in the impacts of the urbanization and socioeconomic development factors, suggesting that their impact differed among northeastern, southern, and western China, sometimes with opposite effects. This was especially true in western China, where most human factors had negative impacts on vegetation cover. Our research has implications for environmental protection planning in regions affected by environmental degradation in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecosystem degradation is a major cause of poverty, and poverty further aggravates ecosystem degradation through a feedback known as the 'poverty trap' that can prevent sustainable socioeconomic development in ecologically fragile areas. However, most ecological restoration programmes have failed to improve the lives of residents of the targeted areas because planners failed to understand the driving forces behind the poverty trap. Finding the threshold conditions for the poverty trap, which represent the conditions when the current state of a system changes to a new and inferior state, can help managers to avoid triggering the poverty trap in ecologically fragile areas. To avoid crossing the threshold, it's necessary to understand the driving mechanisms responsible for the poverty trap so that managers can break the vicious cycle that undermines the effectiveness of ecological restoration. China's ecological restoration has shown that integrating ecological restoration with measures that provide a sustainable livelihood for residents of programme areas can achieve the win–win goal of ecological restoration and poverty alleviation. We found preliminary evidence that there is an income threshold for the poverty trap, and that raising incomes above this level may help residents of restoration areas escape the trap. The examples described in this paper provide valuable guidance for other countries that must achieve similar goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To protect the global ecological environment and prevent threats to human safety and property, nations around the world have invested heavily in ecological restoration programmes. However, we do not know whether these investments have been repaid by the resultant benefits.To answer this question, we developed an improved method of quantifying costs and benefits that accounts for more of the costs associated with ecological restoration, thereby letting us calculate the net benefit.To demonstrate this method, we analysed the Grain for Green Program (GGP), which is the world's largest ecological restoration programme. We found that the increase in net benefits amounted to a total of 530.1 × 109 RMB/year in 2017. However, 11 of China's 25 provinces have incurred net losses due to high cost increases and low increases in benefits under the GGP.Synthesis and applications. Because compensation payments to farmers and herders whose livelihoods were disrupted by implementation of the Grain for Green Program only accounted for 0.8% of the programme's cost, improving compensation payments will be essential to its success. Assessing Grain for Green Program the largest ecological restoration programme in the world will provide guidance for ecological protection and restoration policies around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land degradation is a global problem that seriously threatens human society. However, in China and elsewhere, ecological restoration still largely relies on a traditional approach that focuses only on ecological factors and ignores socioeconomic factors. To improve the effectiveness of ecological restoration and maximize its economic and ecological benefits, a more efficient approach is needed that provides support for policy development and land management and thereby promotes environmental conservation. We devised a framework for assessing the value of ecosystem services that remain after subtracting costs, such as the opportunity costs, costs of forest protection, and costs for the people who are affected by the program; that is, the net value of ecosystem services (NVES). To understand the difference between the value of a resource and the net value of the ecosystem service it provides, we used data on VES, timber sales, and afforestation costs from China's massive national afforestation programs to calculate the net value of forest ecosystem services in China. Accounting for the abovementioned costs revealed an NVES of ¥6.1 × 1012 for forests in 2014, which was 35.9% less than the value calculated without accounting for costs. As a result, the NVES associated with afforestation was 55.9% less than the NVES of natural forests. In some regions, NVES was negative because of the huge costs of human‐made plantations, high evapotranspiration rates (thus, high water opportunity costs), and low forest survival rates. To maximize the ecological benefits of conservation, it is necessary to account for as many costs as possible so that management decisions can be based on NVES, thereby helping managers choose projects that maximize both economic and ecological benefits. Article impact statement: Accounting for the effects of costs on the value of ecosystem services provides a net value that more strongly supports policy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Desertification affects about 36 × 106 km2 of land around the world, two‐thirds of the world's countries and one‐fifth of its population, but poverty prevents these people from developing effective solutions. To balance the need for sustainable development with environmental protection, China's scientists have tested a new and more environmentally friendly approach based on ecological restoration projects that simultaneously provide a sustainable livelihood for the citizens affected by the projects. This strategy for controlling desertification requires cooperation among governments, scientists, and researchers from many disciplines and the communities affected by the program. To document the effectiveness of this strategy, we monitored the implementation of a programme to combat desertification in the Alxa League of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Our study showed that the new strategy can significantly increase vegetation cover, species richness, aboveground biomass, soil organic matter content, and soil nutrients. The successful ecological restoration provides potentially important lessons for other parts of the world that face the joint burden of poverty and environmental degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wetlands generate a wide range of ecosystem services that support human well‐being and socioeconomic development. However, calculation of the value of these services generally fails to account for their costs. In order to understand the difference between the value and the net value of ecosystem services (VES and NES, respectively), we used government statistics and data from published papers about the values and costs of wetland services to calculate their NES in mainland China. After accounting for the opportunity costs, investment in wetland conservation and protection, and management to prevent natural disasters, the NES of China's wetlands totaled 828.1 × 109 RMB in 2014, which is 36.4% less than the VES of 1,301.9 × 109 RMB calculated using the traditional approach. From 1952 to 2014, the NES of wetlands across the country (adjusted for inflation) decreased from 2,215.9 × 109 RMB to 828.1 × 109 RMB. Accounting for the costs to determine the net value of ecosystem services will provide a better foundation to support land planning and utilization. Plain Language Summary: Calculating the value of ecosystem services is important to support planning and land utilization. However, the traditional valuation approach fails to account for the costs of these services, and the resulting overestimated values may lead to unwise decisions. In this paper, we propose a model to estimate the costs of wetland ecosystem services, which include the opportunity costs of water and land, investments in wetland conservation and protection, as well as management to prevent natural disasters, thereby providing a better (more holistic) estimate based on the net value. The net value provides stronger support for decision‐making to support ecological conservation and environmental protection and will provide guidance for future land management. Key Points: The net ecosystem services value can reveal the real benefits of an ecosystemThe net value is more practical than the payment for ecosystem servicesThe net ecosystem services value provides decision‐making for ecological conservation and environmental protection [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Farmland ecosystems are one of the most important landscapes in the world and provide many important ecosystem services for humans. However, most methods of calculating the value of ecosystem services (VES) for these ecosystems have neglected the costs of providing these services or have only considered direct costs. As a result, they have led to the adoption of uneconomical or suboptimal land use and environmental conservation strategies. Because it is increasingly necessary to identify approaches that will produce net benefits both for humans and for the environment that supports us, it is necessary to accurately account for these costs. In this paper, we propose a method for assessing the net value of ecosystem services (NES) for farmland ecosystems, which accounts for both direct and indirect costs, and apply this approach to agriculture in China to provide an improved basis for farmland management. We found that the NES of Chinese farmland decreased from 4.2 × 1012 RMB in 1952 to 3.7 × 1012 RMB in 2014 (1RMB=0.1628USD), in part due to reductions in the area of agricultural land. In addition, the NES in 2014 equaled only 47.4% of the VES, and this percentage would be even lower if more costs could be quantified. Because the direct and indirect costs differ among China's regions, the magnitude of this decrease also varies regionally. To protect China's food security and ecological health, the government will need to adjust farmland management in ways that account for these regional differences to ensure that both humans and our environment benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary 1. During the past three decades, conservation and restoration biologists have increasingly recognized that ecological communities are likely to exhibit threshold changes in structure. However, because long-term monitoring data are generally lacking, little is known about the consequences of such ecological thresholds for the processes of ecosystem degradation and recovery. 2. To identify whether a degradation threshold exists that defines the boundary between the possibility of natural recovery and the need for artificial restoration of an ecosystem and to use this knowledge to support the development of a suitable strategy for environmental restoration, we performed long-term monitoring of vegetation recovery in China's Changting County since 1984. 3. A major problem was identified, which we refer to as the 'irreversible loss of soil services'; when vegetation cover decreases below a degradation threshold, this leads to sustained degeneration of the vegetation community, erosion of the surface soil and declining soil fertility. These changes represent a severe and long-lasting disturbance that will prevent ecosystem recovery in the absence of comprehensive artificial restoration measures. 4. Synthesis and applications. We identified a degradation threshold at about 20% vegetation cover suggesting that for some sites, vegetation cover can serve as a simple proxy for more sophisticated approaches to identifying thresholds; restoration must start with the restoration of soil fertility and continue by facilitating vegetation development. Our results support the concept of ecological thresholds (specifically, for soil services in a warm and wet region) and provide a model to inform restoration strategies for other degraded ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. China's Grain for Green Project is a rapid landscape-scale shift in ground cover and land use with significant implications for biodiversity. From 1998 to 2005, we carried out field studies to examine the landscape-level impacts of this project, and to provide a practical example of the successes and failures of a large-scale attempt to restore a vulnerable environment. 2. In a northern part of China's Shaanxi Province, our results indicated that the total vegetation cover in areas covered by this project increased from 29·7% in 1998 to 42·2% in 2005. However, we also found evidence that large-scale afforestation in this vulnerable arid and semi-arid region could increase the severity of water shortages, decrease vegetation cover in afforestation plots, and adversely affect the number of species present. The exclusion of livestock from overgrazed areas and the elimination of cultivation in marginal areas had the biggest effects on the restoration of vegetation cover, whereas tree planting had a strong negative effect in vulnerable areas. 3. Synthesis and applications. In practical terms, the destruction of natural vegetation cover during afforestation should be avoided, as this makes the soil surface more vulnerable to erosion and reduces species diversity. Managers should reduce the intensity of farming and grazing on fragile land rather than relying on afforestation as the primary tool for ecological restoration in arid and semi-arid areas. Afforestation remains a valuable tool but should be limited to the planting of native or other species that will not exacerbate soil water shortages such as stable communities of natural desert steppe, maximum water-use efficiency dwarf shrubs, and possibly even lichen species in more severely degraded environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]