Four‐level compensation standards and calculation techniques for water ecological protection in the river source regions in China

Abstract

AbstractThe water ecological environment problem in water resources management of river basins mainly lies in the incoordination between the utilization and protection of water resources among different regions. Ecological compensation, therefore, is needed in order to solve this problem. The measurement of reasonable compensation standard plays a vitally important role in the successful establishment of ecological compensation. In this study, a four‐level compensation standard called ‘minimum‐basic‐complete‐maximum’ (MBCM) is proposed, which is based on the calculation of direct cost, the equalization of essential public service for water, opportunity loss and the comprehensive benefit of water ecological environment protection in the source region. MBCM method provides a multi‐level platform for the establishment of the compensation mechanism, which enables different departments to know their respective costs and benefits clearly. The Sanjiangyuan region (SR) in China is chosen as the study area. The results show that (1) the minimum compensation standard for the SR is 300 million RMB per year; (2) the basic compensation standard is 1.7 billion RMB per year; (3) the complete compensation standard is about 3.75 billion RMB per year; (4) the maximum compensation standard creates the total economic value of 181.6 billion RMB for the downstream water output. The proposed MBCM four‐level compensation standard can also be applied to other river source regions.