Special Column:Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of IGSNRR, CAS

The Value of Tibet’s Forest Ecosystem Services

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  • 1. School of Environment and Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China;
    2. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China;
    3. Institute of Tibet Plateau Ecology, Linzhi 860000, China;
    4. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

Received date: 2007-03-26

  Revised date: 2007-05-28

  Online published: 2007-10-25

Abstract

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.Forest ecosystem as renewable resource is a type of public goods,which is non-competitive and non-exclusive.These two characteristics mean that the market is a poor provider of the socially optimal quantity of public goods.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.This paper evaluates Tibet’s forest ecosystem services,and the main evaluation methods include market valuation,opportunity cost,shadow price,replace project,travel- cost and so on.As a result, the storage value of Tibet’s forest ecosystem services is 4454.35 billion yuan RMB,which includes C pool,timber products and biodiversity conservation,and the ecological vale is as 2.24 times as the direct economic value.Additionally,the flow value of Tibet’s forest ecosystem services is 173.83 billion yuan,including annual ecological vale which is 156.59 billion yuan,direct economic value 17.24 billion yuan and social value 0.95 billion yuan,and the ecological vale is as 9 times as the direct economic value.It is proved by the above-mentioned results that forest ecosystem can not only provide direct economic value for society,but also provide ecological function with much higher value,and all of these will provide a solid base for study and practice of eco-compensation and Green-GDP evaluation in Tibet.

Cite this article

WANG Jing-sheng, LI Wen-hua, REN Qing-shan, LIU Mou-cheng . The Value of Tibet’s Forest Ecosystem Services[J]. JOURNAL OF NATURAL RESOURCES, 2007 , 22(5) : 831 -841 . DOI: 10.11849/zrzyxb.2007.05.019

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