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Since the early 2000s, China has carried out extensive "grain-for-green" and grazing exclusion practices to combat desertification in the desertification-prone region (DPR). However, the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of these practices remain unclear. We quantify and compare the changes in fractional vegetation cover (FVC) with economic and population data in the DPR before and after the implementation of these environmental programmes. Here we show that climatic change and CO 2 fertilization are relatively strong drivers of vegetation rehabilitation from 2001-2020 in the DPR, and the declines in the direct incomes of farmers and herders caused by ecological practices exceed the subsidies provided by governments. To minimize economic hardship, enhance food security, and improve the returns on policy investments in the DPR, China needs to adapt its environmental programmes to address the potential impacts of future climate change and create positive synergies to combat desertification and improve the economy in this region., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Ecological restoration and conservation are primary components of sustainable development around the world, particularly during the contemporary era of climate change. However, restoration and conservation are not free; they consume huge amounts of resources that would otherwise support social and economic development. Therefore, excessive conservation creates a risk of creating rather than eliminating poverty. Unfortunately, scientists have largely ignored the balance between these contrasting goals. Here, we discuss the concept of finding the threshold that represents a suitable balance between ecological conservation and economic development, thereby maximizing the benefits for both humans and the environment and promoting sustainable development. To demonstrate the concept, we examined China's ecological restoration achievements and discussed some of the unforeseen negative consequences that accompanied these achievements to discuss how future policies could better balance ecological and socioeconomic goals.

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 × 10 12 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., (© 2019 The Authors. Conservation Biology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Society for Conservation Biology.)

Desertification is the result of complex interactions among various factors, including climate change and human activities. However, previous research generally focused on either meteorological factors associated with climate change or human factors associated with human activities, and lacked quantitative assessments of their interaction combined with long-term monitoring. Thus, the roles of climate change and human factors in desertification remain uncertain. To understand the factors that determine whether mitigation programs can contribute to desertification control and vegetation cover improvements in desertified areas of China, and the complex interactions that affect their success, we used a pooled regression model based on panel data to calculate the relative roles of climate change and human activities on the desertified area and on vegetation cover (using the normalized-difference vegetation index, NDVI, which decreases with increasing desertification) from 1983 to 2012. We found similar effect magnitudes for socioeconomic and environmental factors for NDVI but different results for desertification: socioeconomic factors were the dominant factor that affected desertification, accounting for 79.3% of the effects. Climate change accounted for 46.6 and 20.6% of the effects on NDVI and desertification, respectively. Therefore, desertification control programs must account for the integrated effects of both socioeconomic and natural factors.

China has among the highest biodiversities in the world, but faces extreme biodiversity losses due to the country's huge population and its recent explosive socioeconomic development. Despite huge efforts and investments by the government and Chinese society to conserve biodiversity, especially in recent decades, biodiversity losses may not have been reversed, and may even have been exacerbated by unintended consequences resulting from these projects. China's centralized approach to biodiversity conservation, with limited local participation, creates an inflexible and inefficient approach because of conflicts between local communities and national administrators over the benefits. Although community-based conservation may be an imperfect approach, it is an essential component of a successful future national conservation plan. Biodiversity conservation should be considered from the perspective of systems engineering and a governance structure that combines centralization with community-level conservation. In this paper, we describe China's complex challenge: how to manage interactions between humans and nature to find win-win solutions that can ensure long-term biodiversity conservation without sacrificing human concerns.

Many societies face an income gap between rich regions with access to advanced technology and regions that are rich in natural resources but poorer in technology. This "resource curse" can lead to a Kuznets trap, in which economic inequalities between the rich and the poor increase during the process of socioeconomic development. This can also lead to depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation, social instability, and declining socioeconomic development. These problems will jeopardize China's achievements if the current path continues to be pursued without intervention by the government to solve the problems. To mitigate the socioeconomic development gap between western and eastern China, the government implemented its Western Development Program in 2000. However, recent data suggest that this program has instead worsened the resource curse. Because each region has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, China must escape the resource curse by accounting for this difference; in western China, this can be done by improving education, promoting high-tech industry, adjusting its economic strategy to balance regional development, and seeking more sustainable approaches to socioeconomic development.

China leads the world in afforestation, and is one of the few countries whose forested area is increasing. However, this massive "greening" effort has been less effective than expected; afforestation has sometimes produced unintended environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic consequences, and has failed to achieve the desired ecological benefits. Where afforestation has succeeded, the approach was tailored to local environmental conditions. Using the right plant species or species composition for the site and considering alternatives such as grassland restoration have been important success factors. To expand this success, government policy should shift from a forest-based approach to a results-based approach. In addition, long-term monitoring must be implemented to provide the data needed to develop a cost-effective, scientifically informed restoration policy.

The life of impoverished people can be damaged by adverse environmental conditions, but these people can also be harmed by environmental conservation programs, particularly when the guiding policy ignores their needs. To improve the social and economic effectiveness of environmental protection, governments must understand that the ultimate goal of environmental protection is to improve human livelihoods, not just restore vegetation. The elimination of poverty by the development of sustainable, long-term enterprises is a precondition for successful ecological restoration.

It is widely accepted that environmental degradation and poverty are linked and that conservation and poverty reduction should be tackled together. However, success with integrated strategies has been elusive. Here, we present the results of a study that illustrates how development that combines environmental and economic perspectives and that provides appropriate compensation to affected populations can improve both nature and society, thereby eradicating the "poverty trap." The results show that if we cannot improve the livelihood of local residents, we will be unable to restore degraded environments when state-owned property is transferred to private ownership to encourage better management by residents. In contrast, measures to eliminate poverty, combined with the development of green enterprises that improve the livelihoods of private land owners in the long term, is the precondition for successful ecological restoration.

China is the world's most populous country and has one of the largest territories. As such, Chinese attitudes and behavior with regard to environmental issues are key factors in protecting the world's natural resources and environment. In this study, we surveyed a random sample of 5000 citizens from six Chinese provinces (Beijing, Shanghai, Hubei, Hunan, Henan, and Shaanxi) to understand their environmental attitudes, contrasts between the attitudes of citizens in different demographic groups, and their willingness to invest in environmental conservation. The results indicated that policymakers and the public increasingly recognize the key role that environmental restoration plays in protecting the overall health of the environment. In total, 91% of the interviewees believed that the environment had deteriorated severely during the past decade, compared with 44% in a 1999 survey. In addition, 78% of the interviewees supported their government's investment of more than 300 billion RMB (approximately 10% of total government revenues in 2004) in the "Grain for Green Project", which discouraged unsustainable land use by compensating farmers and herders for abandoning farming and grazing on marginal land. There was a strong correlation between environmental attitudes and net income and education levels, and other differences were based on the respondents' age, gender, job, and location. Net income and education level were the key factors that affected environmental attitudes. Based on these results, we propose that successful environmental restoration projects must include both an education component and an economic development component.

Highlights • The net ecosystem services value can reveal the real benefits of an ecosystem. • The net value is more practical than the payment for ecosystem services. • The net ecosystem services value provides decision-making for ecological conservation and environmental protection. Abstract 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 grassland services to calculate their VES and NES in China. We found that when the associated costs (investment in ecological conservation and restoration, reduction of the risk of natural disasters, water consumption, and land rent) are subtracted from this total, the NES of China's grassland ecosystem services equaled −0.12 × 103 RMB ha−1 yr−1. Except for northeastern China and Inner Mongolia, which have abundant natural resources and lower population and livestock pressure, China's other seven regions had a negative grassland NES. The pressure on grassland by livestock has increased steeply (by 1066.1%), from 29.2 × 106 sheep units in 1977 to 340.5 × 106 sheep units in 2014. This strongly suggests that China's grasslands are being heavily overexploited. In contrast with China's well-funded afforestation programs, the low investments in grassland restoration and management have combined to produce severe degradation of grasslands. China's government should re-examine the benefits of livestock culture by accounting for the costs of this land use and of various restoration methods, and should take measures to preserve and restore the country's fragile grasslands. Our results provide a warning for managers of other ecosystems around the world where calculations of grassland VES may be ignoring significant costs of ecological restoration and preservation, leading to overuse and degradation of the ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimation of ecosystem service values is a hot area of research in ecological conservation and economics. However, the costs of these outputs are largely unknown. In this paper, we estimated the opportunity cost of water allocated to afforestation projects through mathematical modeling based on statistical data for all of China to provide support for restoration planning based on a fuller consideration of the true costs. To guide future ecological conservation and environmental policy development, we illustrate a neglected concept (ecosystem service costs) and use this concept to compare the ecological services provided by ecological restoration based on afforestation with those of restoration based on the conservation of natural vegetation using data obtained since 1949 in China. The results showed that afforestation and natural vegetation create annual costs related to use of the available water resources equal to 4800 and 3700 RMB ha −1 , respectively, representing a water opportunity cost of 1100 RMB ha −1 for afforestation. This illustrates the rule that “there is no free lunch” for any service, including ecosystem services. Therefore, to support the development of more effective and sustainable environmental restoration policy, it will be necessary to evaluate the associated opportunity costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]