How do You Want to restore?--Assessing the Public Preferences and Social Benefits of Ecological Restoration for Natural Rubber Plantation in China

Abstract

Revealing the public’s preference for ecological restoration projects will help increase public support and improve social benefits evaluation accuracy, which is a prerequisite for implementing ecological restoration projects. This study aimed to reveal the public’s preference for natural rubber plantation restoration projects and then quantify the social benefits of these projects to provide valuable references for related policy design. Based on choice experiments, we built a hypothetical market of ecological products and conducted a field survey to obtain the public’s preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for natural rubber plantation restoration projects. Then, a random parameters logit model was applied to obtain public preference information, and then the social benefits brought by different restoration scenarios were calculated and compared. The results showed that: 1) residents of Hainan Province had a positive attitude toward ecological restoration for natural rubber plantations and were willing to bear a personal cost. 2) respondents had significant differences in preference for attributes of restoration projects. 3) a restoration project covering 2.1 million mu of rubber plantations, prioritizing the water source protection area, focusing the implementation on state farms, and developing the under-forest breeding economy would gain more social benefits, precisely, 337.543 million yuan/year. Ecological restoration policies should pay more attention to public needs and incorporate them into future guidelines. Policymakers should focus on restoration quality instead of the restoration area. Priority should be given to rubber plantations close to the water source protection area and small householders, and an appropriate under-forest economy should be considered. This study can provide a valuable reference for policy-making related to rubber plantation restoration.

Gap between Willingness and Behaviors: Understanding the Consistency of Farmers’ Green Production in Hainan, China

“…This paper selected individual characteristics, household characteristics, the external environment, and green production cognition as explanatory variables based on existing studies. Individual characteristics include farmers’ gender, age, ethnicity, education, health status, part-time employment, and risk preference [ 58 , 59 , 60 , 61 ]. Household characteristics include the agricultural labor share, number of dependents, planting scale, land fragmentation, agricultural expenditure, and land transfer.…”

Understanding the differences in cultivated land protection behaviors between smallholders and professional farmers in Hainan Province, China

“…Annual household income directly impacts farming households' access to organic fertilizers, and in general, households with high-income level have more capital to invest in green production (Nastis et al, 2019). At the same time, farmers' CLPB is also easily influenced by social relationships and surrounding neighbors, for example, farmers with more interactions and stronger neighborhood effects are more likely to obtain information about cultivated land protection and thus promote their implementation of CLPB (Tsusaka et al, 2015;Zeweld et al, 2018;Qiao et al, 2022). Therefore, four variables, namely the proportion of agricultural labor, annual household income, number of interactions, and neighborhood effect, were selected to investigate the effects of household characteristics.…”

“…Extension services and support subsidies provide technical and financial support to farmers, respectively, which can reduce the pressure on farmers to conserve their land and thus increase their likelihood of implementing CLPB (Boz, 2016;Zhang et al, 2022). Therefore, this paper also selects the variables of planting scale, number of land plots, extension services and support subsidies to study the influence of production and management characteristics on their CLPB (Abhilash and Singh, 2009;Qiao et al, 2022).…”

Chasing the unbiased willingness to pay: Using an integrated contingent valuation survey in estimating the non-market value of rubber plantation ecological restoration programs in China

“…Therefore, it helps to improve the replanting index and production efficiency, create higher economic benefits for farmers and help them to overcome poverty (Gan et al, 2021). The RPER programs in this paper can effectively promote the transformation and upgrade of rubber plantations, which is a stable and green solution for improving the environmental conditions, enriching biodiversity, and enhancing the ecological function of rubber plantations (Gan et al, 2021;Qiao et al, 2022). However, the recent government-led restoration programs have not been promoted effectively due to the limited funding and technology and the influence of relevant policies, and regulations.…”

“…Environment-friendly rubber plantations have changed the planting structure of monoculture rubber plantations, and helped to increase the plant diversity in the region and improve the species diversity in the system, which can also improve the soil, enhance soil fertility and soil and water conservation capacity, and stabilize the ecosystem (Gan et al, 2021;Qiao et al, 2022). In addition, environmentally friendly rubber plantations can provide a complex planting pattern, i.e., farmers can plant cash crops with higher benefits under rubber trees.…”