The Grain for Green Program Intensifies Trade-Offs between Ecosystem Services in Midwestern Shanxi, China

Baoan Hu,Huifeng Wu,Zuzheng Li,Zhijie Zhang,Xiaoqin Cheng,Hairong Han,Fengfeng Kang

doi:10.3390/rs13193966

Abstract

Ecological engineering is a widely used strategy to address environmental degradation and enhance human well-being. A quantitative assessment of the impacts of ecological engineering on ecosystem services (ESs) is a prerequisite for designing inclusive and sustainable engineering programs. In order to strengthen national ecological security, the Chinese government has implemented the world’s largest ecological project since 1999, the Grain for Green Program (GFGP). We used a professional model to evaluate the key ESs in Lvliang City. Scenario analysis was used to quantify the contribution of the GFGP to changes in ESs and the impacts of trade-offs/synergy. We used spatial regression to identify the main drivers of ES trade-offs. We found that: (1) From 2000 to 2018, the contribution rates of the GFGP to changes in carbon storage (CS), habitat quality (HQ), water yield (WY), and soil conservation (SC) were 140.92%, 155.59%, −454.48%, and 92.96%, respectively. GFGP compensated for the negative impacts of external environmental pressure on CS and HQ, and significantly improved CS, HQ, and SC, but at the expense of WY. (2) The GFGP promotes the synergistic development of CS, HQ, and SC, and also intensifies the trade-off relationships between WY and CS, WY and HQ, and WY and SC. (3) Land use change and urbanization are significantly positively correlated with the WY–CS, WY–HQ, and WY–SC trade-offs, while increases in NDVI helped alleviate these trade-offs. (4) Geographically weighted regression explained 90.8%, 94.2%, and 88.2% of the WY–CS, WY–HQ, and WY–SC trade-offs, respectively. We suggest that the ESs’ benefits from the GFGP can be maximized by controlling the intensity of land use change, optimizing the development of urbanization, and improving the effectiveness of afforestation. This general method of quantifying the impact of ecological engineering on ESs can act as a reference for future ecological restoration plans and decision-making in China and across the world.

Highlights

Ecosystem services (ESs) refer to all the benefits that human beings obtain directly or indirectly from the natural ecosystem to meet and maintain their living needs [1,2]
Our results show that the Grain for Green Program (GFGP) led to a decrease of 23.69% in the area of farmland, and an increase of 24.62%, 19.78%, and 3.64% in the area of forest, grassland, and shrub land, respectively (Table 3), and was the main driving force for the significant increase in regional vegetation cover
We visualized the water yield (WY)-carbon storage (CS), WY-habitat quality (HQ), and WY-soil conservation (SC) trade-offs using root mean squared error (RMSE), and our results show that the west and southeast are the high value areas of the trade-offs (Figure 4)

Summary

Introduction

Ecosystem services (ESs) refer to all the benefits that human beings obtain directly or indirectly from the natural ecosystem to meet and maintain their living needs [1,2]. Human development patterns over the last few centuries have detrimentally affected the health and resilience of natural ecosystems [3,4]. Declines in ESs have been observed at global and regional scales, and these declines pose a significant threat to human well-being [2,5]. Ecological engineering is a widely adopted countermeasure that attempts to mitigate the contradiction between human. 2021, 13, 3966 development and ecosystem protection [6,7]. Ecological engineering aims to increase the sustainable supply of ESs by repairing or improving ecosystem functioning [8,9]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion