Remittance from migrants reinforces forest recovery for China's reforestation policy.

Forests play a key role in the mitigation of global warming and provide many other vital ecosystem goods and services. However, as forest continues to vanish at an alarming rate from the surface of the planet, the world desperately needs knowledge on what contributes to forest preservation and restoration. Migration, a hallmark of globalization, is widely recognized as a main driver of forest recovery and poverty alleviation.

Understanding the mediating role of labor out-migration in household income generation and distribution under a reforestation policy in rural China.

Income inequality is a critical issue of socio-economic development, particularly in rural areas where forest-dependent people are often vulnerable to the intervention of forest policies. This paper aims to elucidate income distribution and inequality of rural households influenced by China's largest reforestation policy implemented in early 2000s. Drawing on socioeconomic and demographic data from household surveys in two rural sites, we applied the Gini coefficient to measure income inequality and used a regression-based approach to examine the underlying factors that are associated with income generation among households.

Understanding the Effects of China's Agro-Environmental Policies on Rural Households' Labor and Land Allocation with a Spatially Explicit Agent-Based Model.

Understanding household labor and land allocation decisions under agro-environmental policies is challenging due to complex human-environment interactions. Here, we develop a spatially explicit agent-based model based on spatial and socioeconomic data to simulate households' land and labor allocation decisions and investigate the impacts of two forest restoration and conservation programs and one agricultural subsidy program in rural China. Simulation outputs reveal that the forest restoration program accelerates labor out-migration and cropland shrink, while the forest conservation program promotes livelihood diversification via increasing non-farm employment.

Effects of payments for ecosystem services programs in China on rural household labor allocation and land use: Identifying complex pathways.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) is increasingly used in developing countries to secure the sustainable provision of vital ecosystem services. The largest PES programs in the world are embedded in China's new forest policies, which aim to expand forest cover for soil and water conservation and improve livelihoods of rural people. The objective of this study is to identify the complex pathways of impacts of two PES programs - the Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP) and the Ecological Welfare Forest Program (EWFP) - on household livelihood decisions, and to quantify the direct and indirect impacts along the identified pathways.

Divergent socioeconomic-ecological outcomes of China's Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program in the subtropical mountainous area and the semi-arid Loess Plateau.

China's Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP) is one of the world's largest Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs. Its socioeconomic-ecological effects are of great interest to both scholars and policy-makers. However, little is known about how the socioeconomic-ecological outcomes of CCFP differ across geographic regions.