Market Pattern For Watershed Services From Forests In China

As China's economy has developed rapidly, ecological and environmental problems, e. g. deforestation, water scarcity, have increasingly become bottlenecks restricting the overall future sustainability of the country's development. The environmental value supplied by the forests, has been gradually recognized, and the attempts of valuation of ecological values have been going on. "Marketing for environmental services (MES)" is a new approach proposed and practised in different countries around the word, as a market-based environmental instrument with the potential to provide powerful incentives for internalizing the externalities of environmental services. The environmental services from forests include watershed services, carbon storage and sequestration, biodiversity services, and landscape. Creating market mechanism for watershed services from forests is shown a promising measure in order to protect the forest resources and to promote the balanced development among different regions along the watershed in China.This paper identifies the basic concepts in term of marketing for watershed services from forests in order to set up common definition in China. As MES is a learning process, the paper reviews and analyzes the international cases in marketing wathershed services, to give experiences and lessons for Chinese MES. Based on international experiences and Chinese practices, the paper synthesizes the existing and potential trading patterns for watershed market, and summarizes the feasibility of establishing market for watershed services from forests in China, and gives the improvement suggestions for different market patterns.The conclusions from this paper include:A. On one hand, international cases provide valuable experiences for marketing watershed services in China, for example, improving upon current public payment schemes, enhancing public participation, ere; on the other hand, they give lessons for Chinese market patterns, such as the failure in identifying quantified relationship between watershed services and forests, the loss of social equity, etc.B. The existing and potential market pattern for watershed services from forests in China include 3 categories: marketing pattern based on improved government payment scheme; negotiation pattern among different administerial regions along the watershed; and private investment pattern. Negotiation among administerial regions is the main patter in recent China. Limitations are identified in all of the patterns.C. The market elements which need to be improved include legislation framework, institutional system, identification and involvement of stakeholders, environmental awareness of stakeholders, fund management capacity, market guidelines, information flow and monitoring system.The research applies the theories and knowledge in Environmental Economics, Institutional Economics, Management, Forestry, Hydrology. The direct outcome of this paper is to find out market schemes which fits into Chinese context, and to work as references and guide for the future practices; the indirect outcome is to optimize natural and social resouces, to achieve the sustainable and balanced development among regions.