Study on Ecological Compensation Mechanism of Xin’an Spring Water Source Protection Zone in Shanxi Province, China

Abstract

As one vital function of water resource for human beings, providing drinking water has become a big problem nowadays, in cases that water resource faces a serious quality and quantity problem. To resolve this issue, one major measure is to establish water resource protection zone. Thus, the ecological compensation mechanism should be coupled with the protection zone construction, because this, according to studies on economics and environment field by many scholars, is an effective and essential measure to maintain the passion of residents and government in water source area to protect the water quality and the ecology there. In this paper, we discussed and promoted one approach to constitute and consummate the ecological compensation mechanism, in order to fulfill a win-win situation between water source protection and economic development. According to the general ecological compensation standard literatures and the specific situation of Xin’an Spring area, we selected ecological service providing cost and ecological value as the calculation basis in this paper. By calculating and analyzing, we got the compensation value for Xin’an Spring water source protection area should be 22.9495 million yuan, and the results could be a little modified under different premises of taking the benefit modifying coefficient.