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Replacing rubber plantations by rain forest in Southwest China—who would gain and how much?

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Abstract

The cultivation of rubber trees in Xishuangbanna Prefecture in China’s Yunnan Province has triggered an unprecedented economic development but it is also associated with severe environmental problems. Rubber plantations are encroaching the indigenous rain forests at a large scale and a high speed in Xishuangbanna. Many rare plant and animal species are endangered by this development, the natural water management is disturbed, and even the microclimate in this region has changed over the past years. The present study aims at an assessment of the environmental benefits accruing from a reforestation project partly reversing the deforestation that has taken place over the past years. To this end, a Contingent Valuation survey has been conducted in Xishuangbanna to elicit local residents’ willingness to pay for this reforestation program that converts existing rubber plantations back into forest. It is shown that local people’s awareness of the environmental problems caused by increasing rubber plantation is quite high and that in spite of the economic advantages of rubber plantation there is a positive willingness among the local population to contribute financially to a reduction of existing rubber plantations for the sake of a partial restoration of the local rain forest. These results could be used for the practical implementation of a Payments for Eco-System Services system for reforestation in Xishuangbanna.

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Notes

  1. This program is also known under the name “Green for Grain.”

  2. We are aware that devising a truly incentive-compatible payment rule takes more than this simple remark but empirical tests in earlier CVM projects conducted in Thailand showed that average respondents are not able to understand the mechanism and the rationality behind an incentive-compatible implementation rule like, e.g., the Clark-Groves mechanism (Heinke 2013, p. 100 and 183 ff.). Therefore, we confined ourselves to the simple implementation rule as described above.

  3. It should be noted that although local authorities were aware of the survey work in their jurisdiction, there was no attempt whatsoever to influence the selection of the households or the survey results.

  4. At an exchange rate of approximately 9.6 RMB/euro when the survey was conducted this equals 308.33 euros.

  5. At an exchange rate of approx. 9.6 RMB/euro when the survey was conducted, this equals 17.07 euros.

  6. The propensity of a respondent to answer to survey questions in a socially desirable manner is assessed by a modified version of the Balanced Inventory for Desirable Responding (BIDR) (Paulhus 1991) according to Börger (2012, 2013).

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Acknowledgments

This survey study was conducted within the framework of the Sino-German Research Cooperation “Living Landscapes—China” funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education. The authors want to thank three anonymous reviewers for their comments which have helped to improve earlier versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Economics (520 F), University of Hohenheim, 70593, Stuttgart, Germany

    Michael Ahlheim

  2. Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Prospect Place, The Hoe, Plymouth, PL1 3DH, UK

    Tobias Börger

  3. Environmental Economics, Institute of Environmental Sciences, University of Koblenz-Landau, 76829, Landau, Germany

    Oliver Frör

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  1. Michael Ahlheim
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  2. Tobias Börger
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  3. Oliver Frör
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Correspondence to Tobias Börger.

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Table 7 Description of variables used in the regression models
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Ahlheim, M., Börger, T. & Frör, O. Replacing rubber plantations by rain forest in Southwest China—who would gain and how much?. Environ Monit Assess 187, 3 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-014-4088-8

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