China.org.cn has a good feature story on the dilemma of Shennongjia in Hubei Province. Shennongjia lies between the Yangtze and Han rivers is now primarily a protected Nature Reserve. It consists of
2,618 square kilometers of forest. According to Qian [Yuankun, officer of Shennongjia Forest District], every year trees here release over 3 million tons of oxygen and absorb about 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide, 1 million tons of dust and nearly 2 million tons of toxic gases. Additionally, as a natural reservoir, Shennongjia Forest District has water storage capacity of 3 billion cubic meters, all of which makes an enormous and invisible contribution to the surrounding areas.
While the efforts to preserve natural conditions within the Reserve have been relatively successful, this success has prevented commercial exploitation of the area, and adversely impacted the economic welfare of the local human inhabitants who had previously made their livelihoods by tapping into the forest’s resources, especially timber.
in the first quarter of 2009, among the 17 prefecture-level cities in the province, Shennongjia was bottom as usual, with less than one seventh of Tianmen’s GDP, which was placed last but one.
“How can we ignore the fact that we are always last in the list of cities in Hubei by GDP?” sighs Xiang Changyou, director of the local development and reform commission. How to resolve this problem?
On the one hand, its government has made efforts to protect the local environment and achieved considerable success; on the other hand, the area has lost out on opportunities to improve local economic development. To continue protecting the environment, or to focus on promoting the economy? This is the question for Shennongjia.
One potential solution was proposed by Forest District Officer Qian during the March 2009 meeting of China’s National People’s Congress. He “put forward the idea of ecological compensation for Shennongjia, which gave rise to considerable debate.” Shennongjia officials argue that the community should receive ecological compensation, because it has “sacrificed many opportunities to improve economic development in order to protect its natural environment.” At the end of 2008, Shennongjia was enrolled as a pilot for a national ecological compensation system, but “the sum of 500,000 yuan (US$73,206) that was distributed was a drop in the bucket in the context of the present poverty level of Shennongjia.” Local officials are looking for a sweeter pay off.
This is an important issue for China’s future. I sympathize with the plight of the people of Shennongjia, but setting a precedent of paying significant “ecological compensation” will hamper efforts to establish more nature reserves in China. If the psychic compensation of living in a beautiful natural area is not enough, maybe the dissatisfied locals should join the great migration to the cities.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Adam Minter // Jun 17, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Charlie - Bigfoot should get his own post. My two cents.
2 cmcelwee // Jun 17, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Excellent suggestion. Done.
3 Doug Yu // Jun 17, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Direct payments for ecological services are a well-established and effective way to preserve natural amenities. The fact that China is poor is almost irrelevant, because the payments needed to compensate for lost opportunities is also then low. The technical question is what amount of money is needed to (1) move the incentive from use to non-use, and (2) be seen as just.
I think this is a great precedent to set in China. We pay for everything else in life; we all (urban dwellers too) need to learn to pay for nature, when it is feasible and enforceable.
A related issue is whether one ends up financing a conservation mafia, as it were, or spreading the money around. From a social justice viewpoint, we would want the latter, but either would be effective. Note that installing a reserve without compensation for locals takes the conservation mafia route.
4 cmcelwee // Jun 17, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Daniel, thanks for your comment. Are you contending the locals here had a legally protected interest in this land under Chinese law? Article 9 of the Chinese Constitution provides:
All mineral resources, waters, forests, mountains, grasslands, unreclaimed land, beaches, and other natural resources are owned by the state, that is, by the whole people, with the exception of the forest, mountains, grasslands and unreclaimed land and beaches that are owned by collectives in accordance with the law.
The state ensures the rational use of natural resources and protects rare animals and plants. Appropriation or damaging natural resources by any organization or individual by whatever means is prohibited.
If this land was owned by a collective, the members of the collective should certainly be compensated, but given the nature of this land, I suspect it was state owned.
I suppose one could argue (but not very successfully under Chinese law) that the locals had some prescriptive use right or adverse possession interest, but these rights were not very long standing since it appears that most of the people in the area were moved there in the 1950’s to work in the local lumber business. It would be hard to prove prescriptive use or adverse possession in those circumstances.
I have no objection (as a matter of social policy) to paying the people in the area to move to other locales where jobs are more plentiful or paying to retrain them to work in areas that don’t involve exploitation of the local natural resources. I would also agree to let the state waive any claims against them for the use and destruction of state-owned ecological services in the past.
I think that direct payments to compensate for the lost use of “ecological services” is a bad idea in China if for no other reason than the fact that all too often payments for appropriation of collective land do not make it into the hands of the members of the collective.
5 chriswaugh_bj // Jun 18, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Eco-tourism, anyone? Why not have some wild man safaris? Done properly, could that not create an economic situation in which it is in the best interest of the locals to preserve the environment?
6 John Z // Jun 24, 2009 at 9:55 am
I don’t know what’s the case in Shennongjia, but in several places in Yunnan experimentation with compensation for ecosystem services is already underway. Down in Xishuangbanna Nature Reserve (soon to be National Park), they’re trying to figure out how the rights to collectively owned land within the reserve should be distributed among households so as to assure equitable and legitimate compensation. Pretty odd: parceling out household ‘rights’ so that people can *not* use the land but get the benefit of compensation tied to the responsibility not to use.
Interesting note here is that collective tenure as a solution for resource management is ruled out in the state’s drive to individualize all property rights. Administratively, that makes sense, because using the yikatong (one-card-through) system for transfers might circumvent a conservation mafia.
Forestry officials tell me they’re doing a willingness-to-accept study in the coming months and comparing to places in Guangdong where compensation levels are higher (no exact figure). Informants have told me that there is actually a national rule stipulating Y5/mu/household/year. Anyone know just where I might access this regulation?
The recently established Pudacuo National Park provided several thousand yuan per household for 40-something households in the village engulfed by the park–but ending after 3 years, and excluding surrounding villages whose grazing rights were curtailed.
7 cmcelwee // Jun 24, 2009 at 6:30 pm
@John Z Thanks for the information! I haven’t heard of the national rule re: compensation levels, but I did happen a provision in the new Water Pollution Law amendments which provides:
第七条 国家通过财政转移支付等方式，建立健全对位于饮用水水源保护区区域和江河、湖泊、水库上游地区的水环境生态保护补偿机制。
Article 7 The State will, through such methods as fiscal transfer payment, establish and perfect an ecological protection compensation mechanism for the water environment located in drinking water source protection zones and the upper reaches of rivers, lakes and reservoirs.
I can’t swear this section wasn’t in the previous version of the Law, but I don’t think it was.
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