The Status and Prospect of Forest Ecological Benefit Compensation

Forest is one of the most important terrestrial ecosystems on the earth.Besides supplying timber and other goods,forest has vital effect on environment and provides significant ecological services for people.However,a larger part of the value of those ecological services could not be realized via market transactions.This market-failure creates a need for seeking governmental intervention to solve the positive externality of forest ecological benefits.It is crucial to establish eco-compensation mechanism which has become one of the hot spots in the field of ecological economic studies.This is particularly important in China,which possesses limited forest resources and a large population.With rapid economic development,resources over-exploitation and environmental deterioration have become a bottleneck to the socio-economic development in China,and forest resources loss is believed to be closely associated with ecological and environmental degradations.Therefore,forest conservation has gained increasingly attention and the Chinese government has taken a series of actions to protect forest resources.Based on relevant literature review,this paper makes clear the conception of forest ecological benefit compensation and introduces the current domestic and international researches on this issue.Through the analysis of theories and practices of forest ecological benefits compensation abroad,some inspirations are drawn on establishing the forest ecological benefits compensation mechanism,for examples:governmental investment,beneficiaries pay,market transition and institutional framework.Meanwhile,it is claimed that there are still many insufficiencies in the forest ecological benefit compensation of China such as non-clear concept of eco-compensation,lack of scientific bases for accounting method and systems,limited institutional experience,inadequate legal framework or supporting institutions and lack of farmers' participation.Based on the above analysis,it is considered that further researches on ecological compensation should be carried out.Finally,the policy recommendations are presented in the paper,including increasing governmental support,diversifying financing channels,improving mechanisms management,establishing legal framework,strengthening scientific research on standard-making and raising public awareness on ecological compensation.