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Feedback effect of crop raiding in payments for ecosystem services

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Abstract

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) may alter dynamics in coupled human and natural systems, producing reciprocal feedback effects on socioeconomic and environmental outcomes. As forests recover following China’s two nation-wide PES programs, wildlife-related crop raiding has been increasingly affecting rural people’s livelihoods. We evaluate the feedback effect of crop raiding on people’s intention to convert their cropland plots into forests under different PES program scenarios in the Tianma National Nature Reserve. Increases in crop raiding, conservation payment amounts, and program duration significantly increased local people’s intention to enroll their cropland plots in future PES programs. Our results suggest that a substantial portion of economic benefit from the current PES programs was offset by the feedback effect of crop raiding promoted by these programs. Therefore, such complex human–environment interactions should be incorporated into the design and evaluation of China’s PES practices and other PES programs around the world.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the US National Science Foundation (Grant Number DEB-1313756). We thank the School of Forestry and Landscape Architecture at Anhui Agricultural University for assistance in field data collection, and the associate editor and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms on an earlier draft of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carolina Hall, Campus Box 3220, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

    Xiaodong Chen, Qi Zhang & Conghe Song

  2. Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology Program, Department of Forestry & Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Box 7646, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    M. Nils Peterson

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  1. Xiaodong Chen
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Correspondence to Xiaodong Chen.

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Chen, X., Zhang, Q., Peterson, M.N. et al. Feedback effect of crop raiding in payments for ecosystem services. Ambio 48, 732–740 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-018-1105-0

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