Study On The Efficiency Of The Natural Forest Protection Project In Shannxi

China's ecological project, the Natural Forest Protection Program (NFPP), has made preliminary progress on ecological, economic and social effects since it was launched as a pilot scheme in 1998 and conducted on full scale from 2000 to 2010 in Shannxi Province. The great contribution the project has made to protection of ecological environment and sustainable social and economic development makes it necessary to analyze and evaluate systematically its comprehensive effects, providing suggestions on policies of subsequent conduct and development of the project.As the comprehensive effects evaluation of the NFPP has not been carried out in China, the paper intends to set up an index system of overall effects evaluation and analyze the ecological, social and economic effects through an analysis of the NFPP conducted in Shannxi. The following targets are expected to be achieved:1. To build an index system of NFPP effects evaluation and provide a feasible quantification approach;2. To find out the advantages and disadvantages of the NFPP in Shannxi by applying the system to it;3. To provide suggestions on policies of subsequent conduct of the NFPP in Shannxi.The paper is constituted of six chapters as follows:Chapter one is an introduction of this paper, including the research background, purpose, significance and method. Then the author presents the innovation this paper may have achieved.Chapter two analyzes the theoretic basis of the NFPP conduct and effects evaluation.Chapter three introduces the conduct and building of NFPP in Shannxi, elaborates the situation of nature, ecological environment and the distribution of natural forest in Shannxi Province, and details the achievements and progress the NFPP has made in the past decade since its conduct.Chapter four constructs the index system of NFPP effects evaluation and details the principles, thoughts and methods about index selection. Then the author explains and assigns a value to the index and sets the weight for the index with Analytic Hierarchy Process. Chapter five evaluates the comprehensive effects of NFPP in Shannxi. Through data collection and quantitative analysis, the author obtains indexes at all levels and evaluates the Shannxi NFPP effects in the ways of both hierarchy weight and index calculation.Chapter six proposes the disadvantages of NFPP in Shannxi Province and presents optimization measures for its subsequent construction from the perspectives of ecological, economic and social effects.