Abstract
China has been implementing one of the world's largest ecological rehabilitation projects, the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP), to improve its fragile and precarious environmental conditions. This chapter measures the socioeconomic impacts of the NFPP using input–output (I–O) models. We find that the NFPP will expand the annual output of the forest sectors by 5.8 billion Yuan and the whole economy by 8.9 billion Yuan by 2010. Employment will increase by 0.84 million in the forest sectors and by 0.93 million in the whole economy. Associated with the enormous expansion of forest protection and management are huge contributions to mitigating water runoff, soil erosion, flooding, and biodiversity loss. The investments and adjustments are thus worthwhile, if the program is properly implemented. The challenges are to transform loggers into tree planters and forest managers and to ensure that the financial and institutional commitments by the local and national governments will be materialized.
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Notes
- 1.
The Sloping Land Conversion, or “Grain for Green,” Program is another new initiative of ecological rehabilitation. For more details, see Forest and Grassland Taskforce (2003) and Xu et al. (2006).
- 2.
China has a total forestland of 155 million ha (Xu et al., 2006).
- 3.
As pointed out by a reviewer, in addition to alleviating the pressures on domestic forests, increased timber imports enable the maintenance of a larger share of the wood products processing facilities, which will further swing the balance towards positive net effects of the NFPP.
- 4.
Despite the bottleneck nature of the forest sectors to the Chinese economy, the shares of industry output and GDP are much higher compared to those, say, for the United States. In addition to China's stage of economic development, a main reason is that the country takes the gross value of the standing forests into account.
- 5.
Since we intended to focus on the socioeconomic impacts of the NFPP in this study, we decided not to consider questions related to changes in timber production and forest management outside of the NFPP coverage and the increased imports of forest products. Certainly, they can be addressed in a similar manner.
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Acknowledgments
This article was originally published in Environment and Development Economics in 2006 [11(6): 769–788]. The authors appreciate comments made then by two anonymous reviewers and the Editors, as well as those by Gary Bull, Bill Hyde, Zhou Li, Can Liu, Gary Man, Xiufang Sun, Jennifer Turner, Andy White, Qing Xiang, Jintao Xu, and Lei Zhang. They are also grateful to Yaxiong Zhang from China's National Center of Economic Information, who provided the input–output tables. This project was partially supported by the US National Science Foundation, the Forest Trends, and USDA Forest Service Office of International Programs.
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Shen, Y., Liao, X., Yin, R. (2009). Measuring the Aggregate Socioeconomic Impacts of China's Natural Forest Protection Program. In: Yin, R. (eds) An Integrated Assessment of China's Ecological Restoration Programs. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2655-2_14
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