The True Valuation of Land Use Project in China Considering Ecosystem Services

Abstract

Nowadays, most land use projects disregard the impact of their decisions on the biosphere. However, they often directly affect the biodiversity and lead to environmental degradation. Considering this issue, we first select indexes from four dimensions: provisioning, regulating, supporting and culture, and establish a static ecosystem services valuation (SESV) model using equivalent factor method. Then, introducing dynamic adjustment coefficient and current discount rate, we construct a dynamic ecosystem services valuation (DESV) model, which is used to put a value on the environmental cost of land use projects. Moreover, we use entropy method to calculate the weights of the economic benefit indexes we choose and establish an economic benefit (EB) model to determine project benefit. After that, we select Canglong District Development Project in Wuhan and Three Gorges Project in China as a small community-based project and a large national project respectively to perform a cost benefit analysis using the models. As the results, compared to small-scale project, large-scale project can greatly increase the economic benefit, but at the same time, it notably increases the environmental degradation cost. Effectiveness analysis proves that the results are effective and reliable.