Provincial eco-compensation zonings and standards of cultivated land in China

Abstract: Eco-compensation can be a tradeoff between the intensity of cultivated land protection and economic profits among regions, as the center of gravity of cultivated land area moves northward, like "large cultivated land county, small economic county" and "large grain county, poor financial county". The concept of "Payments for Environmental Services" was introduced in China, providing a new perspective on cultivated land protection. However, a complete system has not been established, in terms of the subject and object determination, compensation standard, procedure, funding source and supervision measures of cultivated land eco-compensation. It is very necessary to demarcate the payment/compensation zones, and then quantify the compensation standards in the cultivated land eco-compensation system, in order to better balance the relationship between the spatial transfer of cultivated land ecological carrying capacity (CLECC) and ecological equity. In this study, a differential zoning of "four quadrants" was constructed, according to the surplus and deficit of CLECC with the target of cultivated land retention in the provinces. Then, the opportunity cost was applied to evaluate the payment/compensation standard and optimal amount in total for the decision-making. The results show that: 1) According to the shadow number of cultivated land by the province in 2019, 17 and 14 provinces were characterized by the deficit and surplus zone of CLECC, respectively, indicating a spatial difference of "surplus in north and deficit in the south". About 23.21% of the ecosystem services of cultivated land were transferred from the surplus to the deficit zone. 2) The payment/compensation zone presented a spatial pattern of "strip-interspersed" from the northeast to the southwest. The full-compensation zone was mainly distributed in the provinces of cultivated land areas (8 provincial administrative regions). The reduced-compensation zone was mainly located in the central and Eastern Plains (6 provincial administrative regions). The full-payment zone was mostly located in the eastern coastal developed regions (5 provincial administrative regions). The reduced-payment zone was mainly distributed in the Loess Plateau, the Sichuan Basin, and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (12 provincial administrative regions). 3) The average payment/compensation standard decreased gradually from the full-payment to the full-compensation zone, indicating the optimal values of 6.13×104 yuan/hm2 in total. 4) Specifically, Heilongjiang Province received compensation of about 168.3 billion yuan at most, and Jiangxi Province received about 1.45 billion yuan at less. Zhejiang Province was paid for 215.1 billion yuan at most, and Gansu Province paid for 3.08 billion yuan at less. Lorenz Curve was selected to verify that the fiscal revenue gap between provinces was reduced by 0.06 under the cultivated land eco-compensation. The innovative system can be widely expected to stimulate the behavior of environmental protection for the sustainable development of cultivated land in the form of monetary quantity. To sum up, the cultivated land eco-compensation can be connected with the ecological compensation and cultivated land protection policies, particularly for the better interactive relationship between cultivated land eco-protectors benefiting and beneficiaries paying. The finding can provide a strong reference to improve the local cultivated land protection.