Geographic Context-Specific Impacts on Residents’ Willingness to Support Ecological Restoration in China’s Dryland

Abstract

Under the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021 to 2030), a geographic context-specific issue emerged that how local people would like to support ecological restoration programs. Regarding previous studies, which often identified the key variables at a fixed scale, we formulated the scientific question as follows: how do landscape-level variables influence the impact of individual-level characteristics on residents’ willingness to support ecological restoration? Based on a survey of 2,753 households that experienced ecological restoration programs in China’s dryland and 4 landscape-level variables, namely, normalized difference vegetation index, land surface temperature, relative humidity, and precipitation, we quantitatively measured the geographic context-specific impacts on residents’ willingness to support ecological restoration by multilevel linear models. The results demonstrated that the cross-scale effects of normalized difference vegetation index were mostly negative (3 negative and 1 positive), the cross-scale effects of land surface temperature were mostly positive (1 negative and 4 positive), and relative humidity has only 1 negative cross-scale effect. The cross-scale effect was apt to exist in residents landscape utilization characteristics rather than the commonly used residents demographic characteristics, such as gender, age, education, income, and family structure. We conclude that the findings on the impacts of local individual-level variables are likely to lose generalizability and replicability if the geographic context is ignored.