Pollution caused by dust has been, and remains, a significant problem in northeast China. Dust storms, pushed by prevailing westerly winds, begin in China's western provinces, from where the dust blows eastwards, resulting in air pollution to cities, most notably Beijing, and even reaching Korea and Japan. The dust storms have their beginnings in land and water resource degradation in western areas of China, which are also the source of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers. Estimates put the extent of this degradation at 135 million hectares or approximately 14 per cent of China's land mass. This equates to 30 per cent of total pasture land in China being eroded, desertified or salinised. Of greater concern is that these degraded areas are expanding by 1.3 million hectares a year.
Responding to this, the Chinese Government has implemented the Grain for Green Program (GFGP) offering farmers incentives to establish trees and perennial pastures. Uptake has exceeded expectations, putting the financial viability of this program at risk. So far the Program has not sufficiently answered one key question: what will happen to the farmers in these areas if land use and agricultural practices are not sustainable and profitable? Developing sustainable land use requires farmers to earn an income in the short- and long-term. Short-term income assistance is on offer through the program, but this will only last five years and there are signs that this may be an insufficient period of time to establish sustainable industries. The challenge is to develop land use practices that address degradation and ensure agriculture can continue sustainably well into the future.
This project facilitated the development of policies that will ensure changes in land use management in China's northwest provinces that are sustainable in the long term (defined in terms of the financial viability of farming communities, social acceptability and environmental impacts).
The project sought to understand the financial and social impacts of the GFGP at the level of the individual farmer household and the immediate farming community by assembling existing data and selecting case study sites to undertake surveys of farmers and administrators. Researchers assessed the socioeconomic consequences of the GFGP from a national perspective, using an extended social cost-benefit analysis that includes estimates of off-site benefits including:
reduced air pollution in eastern centres
downstream effects such as reduced flooding incidence and improved water quality
improved viability of rural communities.
The researchers also undertook biophysical "linkage" data collection, choice modelling and integration and analysis. They considered alternative policy options for securing sustainable land use change in the north-west provinces by drawing on the results of the farmer/local community level analysis and the social cost-benefit analysis, using a theoretical framework of New Institutional Economics. They also reviewed current policy context, including incentives and the alternative policy arrangements and transaction costs for these. They facilitated the use of the research findings in the development of policy initiatives, and built up the capacity of Chinese individuals and organisations to undertake research and provide policy advice in the field of natural resource management.
The project focused on elements of a cost-benefit analysis of the GFGP Program. However, due to the limitation of time available for the initial project, the impact of the GFGP on watershed protection, especially on flood mitigation, was not quantified and evaluated. The lack of information on the flood mitigation impact of the GFGP and the associated economic benefits so derived constrained the comprehensive assessment of the Program.
Thus the extension phase of the project aimed to fill this information gap through an analysis of the flood mitigation effect of the GFGP in the Yellow River Basin. In this extension, the researchers developed a physically-based distributed hydrological model (WEP-L model) to simulate the natural hydrological processes from 1956 to 2000 in the Yellow River Basin. From this they determined that the GFGP had a relatively small potential impact on flood reductions in the Yellow River Basin, with an economic benefit from flood reductions of CNY362 million. Compared to the total investment of around CNY65.5 billion in the region under the GFGP, these benefits are small. Based on these findings, the potential economic benefits from flood reductions will be offset by the potential economic losses from lower agricultural production (CNY667 million) due to reduced runoff under the Program.
The research contributed to the knowledge base of current research work on the GFGP. It addressed the priority issue around the implementation of the GFGP which is the quantification of its ecological impacts, identified key areas for further research, and helped improve decision-making in the GFGP policy context. The work also has implications for the ranking of the management options (either structural or non-structural) to mitigate flood disasters in the Yellow River Basin.
Two other tasks undertaken during the extension phase were the compiling of a book based on the project research reports and scoping of a new research report as part of continuing the collaboration between ANU and the State Forestry Administration in China.
Links:
[1] http://www.aciar.gov.au/country/China
[2] http://apseg.anu.edu.au/staff/jb_suslndrr.php
[3] http://crawford.anu.edu.au/staff/jb_suslndrr.php
[4] http://www.aciar.gov.au/programarea/Agricultural Development Policy