Postdoc Qi Zhang Co-Authors Paper on China’s Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP)

Qi Zhang, a post-doctoral associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, is the lead author of a recent paper exploring the outcomes of China’s Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP), one of the largest Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs in the world.

In the paper, published in the journal Ecosystem Services, the authors examine the socioeconomic and ecological outcomes of the CCFP in two different geographical regions, finding divergent outcomes on migration behavior. The program stimulates local- and distant-migration in a subtropical mountainous area in the Anhui province and discourages distant-migration in the semi-arid Loess Plateau, which has profound implications for the sustainability of forest conservation. The authors conclude that it is critical to account for regional differences in the design of large-scale PES programs in the future.

Read more about Zhang’s Pardee Center research on human-environment interactions and land-use dynamics here.