Factors Influencing Farmers’ Willingness to Participate in Wetland Restoration: Evidence from China

Abstract

Abstract:The Poyang Lake wetland has been at the center of discussion in China's wetland restoration initiative because of the extent of its ecosystem degradation. The purpose of this paper is to model farmers' willingness to participate in wetland restoration and analyze factors that will affect farmers' participation decisions. A household survey was conducted among 300 randomly selected farm-households in the Poyang Lake area, Jiangxi Province. A binary probit regression model is applied to investigate the impacts of farmer demographics, farm characteristics, and farmers' perceptions of wetland and wetland restoration policies on willingness to participate in wetland restoration. Results show that farmers' education level, household migrant members, number of dependents, household net income, farm type, and distance to urban areas have significant effects on farmers' participation in wetland restoration. Farmers' perceptions about the ecological values and benefits of wetlands and their knowledge about wetland restoration policies do not appear to significantly influence farmers' willingness to participate. A gap is identified between awareness of the importance of wetland restoration and willingness to take actions to restore wetlands. Farm-households tend to weigh personal needs and economic conditions when making participation decisions.

How Willing Are Herders to Participate in Carbon Sequestration and Mitigation? An Inner Mongolian Grassland Case

“…This may be mainly due to the fact there are a large number of herders (83% of 404) with low cognition in the research area. Unlike Zhu et al [22] but similar to Kong et al [21], we find that the number of family members and the corresponding trainings and guidance have no significant effect on herders' willingness to participate. This finding may be explained by the fact that local carbon sequestration and mitigation policies are easy to be adopted.…”

“…On the other hand, although herders have a relatively strong willingness to participate in carbon sequestration and mitigation measures in this area, there is also one group with relative high unwillingness to participation based on the conditional inference decision tree analysis. Similar to many previous studies, the family income plays a key role in improving herders' willingness [15,17,22,24]. This suggests that it is important to protect the herders' family income for improving their willingness.…”

“…Unlike some studies in other areas, such as forest, farmland, and wetland, the results of this study showed that 83% of the 404 herdsman households that were surveyed in this area were in the state of no understanding for grassland carbon sequestration and mitigation, and only 17% were in the state of understanding, implying a considerably lower cognitive level [6,21,22]. Hong found that peasant households who had previously participated in carbon sink projects had a significantly improved cognition level than those that did not participate in these projects [23].…”

“…Internal influencing factors referred to individual characteristics of the participants, such as the age of family members, their education degree, their knowledge and experience about carbon sequestration and mitigation, the number of labor force, and the financial income of the family [14,18,19]. For example, higher participation willingness was found in families with generally younger members than those with aging members, and in families with high financial income than those with poor financial income [20][21][22]. The family financial income is considered to be a key factor to participation willingness [17].…”

Are poultry farmers willing to insure their farms? Empirical evidence from Ghana

“…Risks have both direct and indirect impact on farmers' well-being and have the potential to increase the depth of poverty (Hoogeveen, Tesliuc, Vakis, & Dercon, 2005). Exposure of farmers to risks causes wide swings in farm income (Ullah, Shivakoti, Zulfiqar, & Kamran, 2016), makes long-term investment planning difficult (REAS, 2010), and constraints farmers' ability to receive credit from financial institutions (World Bank, 2011Bank, , 2018. It also swings budgetary requirements for any given import and strains foreign exchange reserves (Schneider, 2010).…”