Trade-offs between local farmers' demand for ecosystem services and ecological restoration of the Loess Plateau, China

Abstract

Knowledge of ecosystem services (ES) supply and demand is highly important in formulating an effective and sustainable environmental policy. Since the 1980s, the Chinese government has implemented a series of nature conservation policies in the Loess Plateau, which has experienced heavy losses of soil and water. Based on this background, studies of ES supply in the Loess Plateau have received much attention, but local farmers’ demand for ES have been neglected. In the hilly and gully catchment of the Loess Plateau, we selected indicators, including key provisioning services (grain production and livestock), key regulating services (soil protection and water conservation) and local farmers’ income derived from ES, and constructed the supply and demand index of ES to examine changes from 1938 to 2010. The results show that the supply pattern of ES at our site was dominated by the government, especially after 1985. In recent years, the most concerning demand for ES by local farmers shifted from direct provisioning and regulating services to ES-related incomes. However, household surveys showed that the economic demand of most farmers could not be satisfied by the incomes derived from ES (e.g., livestock sales and subsidies from the Grain for Green policy), and a growing number of local farmers have left the catchment to become migrant workers, thus threatening the social stability of local villages. For future development of the Loess Plateau, the benefits of ES improvement should be offered more widely to local farmers who are the main forces of ecological restoration and ES sustainability.