Research On Farmers' Behavior Response To Forest Ecological Compensation

Yunnan province has rich forest resources with a number of indicators ranked the forefront nationwide.It not only serves as an ecological barrier for the southwest region,but also undertaking the strategic task of maintaining China's and even the international ecological security.However,the ecological environment of Yunnan is relatively sensitive and fragile,so ecological environment protection task is very heavy.Especially under the special natural and humanistic environment in Yunnan province,as the minority inhabited community,the state-owned forest region has relatively backward economic development with high degree of dependence on forest resources.The tendency is still outstanding that more attentions are paid on economic development rather than environmental protection.Therefore,to build a scientific and reasonable ecological compensation mechanism is the major initiatives of Yunnan to construct resource-conservation and environmental friendly society,which also conforms to the urgent needs of the ecological civilization construction and realization of the beautiful Yunnan.However,it is important to note that the forest farmers increasingly become the main body of forest management and the construction of ecological civilization whose behavior directly affects the benefit of ecological compensation and the efficiency of ecological environment protection.This group plays an important role in protecting forest and forest ecological benefit compensation.Its behavior and response have a critical and decisive function on the role of ecological benefit compensation in forest building,cultivation,protection and management.Based on this,this study takes Yunnan province as an example,well analyzing forest farmers' behavior and responses for ecological compensation,which exerting important theoretical value and practical significance.This study helps not only to enrich ecological compensation theories in ecological environment protection functional areas,and also to coordinate the government control and market regulation,correctly handling the relationship between economic development and environmental protection.Based on field survey data from some counties in Yunnan province,this study analyzes forest farmers' behavior and responses for ecological compensation from the microscopic level.Different from previous researches taking farmers as the aggrieved group,namely the object of compensation,this study takes government,enterprises and other organizations as main compensation bodies.In addition,unlike previous studies to investigate farmers' cognition and participation intention,this study also analyzed the forest farmers' evaluation of ecological compensation and preferences for compensation mode,putting forward related suggestions on increasing the service efficiency of forest ecological benefit compensation fund from the perspectives of compensation object.Moreover,this study has focused on the evaluation of effects of the ecological compensation on forest farmers' behavior and management,and on the analysis of farmers' behavior and responses for ecological compensation from both positive(forest land input)and negative(forest land acquisition)levels.Finally,this study has constructed a game model of various main bodies in forest ecological compensation system to discusses relationship between the central government,local governments and forestry farmers,which helps to analyze forest ecological compensation in a systematic view and further improve the forest ecological compensation system.Main conclusions are as follows:(1)although it is generally believed that in recent years,the local forestry ecological environment becomes better,more than half of the farmers think that forest ecological environment protection hinders local economic development.The majority farmers(66.67%)think that forest ecological compensation can inspire them to protect the forest land and 69.25% of farmers tend to choose cash compensation.(2)The forest ecological compensation can significantly promote the maintain of forest right by building boundary markers,terminus and limiting sulcus,also can stimulate farmers take fire prevention and planting to improve the ecological environment,which shows that to a certain extent,forest ecological compensation can improve forest ecological environment and protection.However,there is no significant effect of forest ecological compensation on forest land access behavior.Farmers' behavior in the woodland has not decreased,which means that the forest ecological compensation does not significantly affect farmers' management ways.(3)Most of farmers in forestry areas hold positive attitudes towards the ecological compensation and are willing to pay to support government's plans for ecological compensation.This shows that forest farmers also recognize the positive externalities of forest ecological protection and support principles of ecological compensation that “who benefit who pay for the compensation ”.However,significant differences factors that influencing farmers' willingness to pay are found among professional and concurrent business farmers,as well as traditional decentralized farmers and farmers of large scales.(4)By building a game model,it is found that from the perspective of guiding forest farmers to change their behaviors,forest ecological compensation system is not able to achieve the designed goals,and the key is whether farmers can conduct protection measures after getting compensation depends on the benefit balance of protection and development.At current level of forest ecological compensation and with current compensation system,and the management behavior of forest farmers is difficult to change.Suggestions are that firstly full knowledge of ecological value and strategic position of forestry resources in Yunnan province should be realized and government investment in the forestry ecological environment construction should be increased;secondly further improvement of the forest ecological compensation mechanism should be implemented to standardize farmers' behavior and response for ecological compensation.Thirdly,government should promote the sustainable development of forest ecological environment and the prosperity of forestry economy.