Empirical Research In Economics Of Ecological Compensation Standard In The Northwest Fragile Ecology

Since the wide distributions of forests, grasslands, rivers and wetlands, northwest possesses a complex ecological environment and a variety of ecotypes. Hence it provides a large number of ecological services and related ecological products for different regions in our country. In recent years, most people in northwest lack awareness of environmental protection because of the slow-growth of economy, increase of poor population, and the backward education level. They prefer to progress in economy while sacrifice environment resulting in river flows cutoff and drying up, devastation of grass lands and forests. What is worse, the vulnerability of northwest environment makes it hardly any recovery from the disruption. Therefore it is very urgent to preserve the ecological environment in ecologically vulnerable regions of northwest. To offset the economic loss of northwest people caused by the environmental protection, people in other regions who benefit from the protection are amenable to provide the compensation. At the present stage, there is no proper standard of ecological compensation for northwest in our country. Ecological resources are public products, hence their value is difficult to be determined via market transactions. The compensation standard in hand is vague and backward to some extent. Thus the environment is usually broken again for the improper compensation. Though there are methods of studying ecological value proposed by scholars, most of them can not come into use because of the operational complexity or the low compensation.In this paper, with Gannan state taken as an example, the grassland ecosystem, which is the main ecosystem in Gannan state, was studied. Based on the ecosystem service function index proposed by Costanza in his paper’The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital’, with the actual situation considered, we construct the compensation standard of grassland ecosystem in Gannan state. According to our standard, the economic mode of production and the special regionalism, we analysis and compare the ecological values of grassland ecosystem, forest ecosystem and wetland ecosystem in northwest. The calculation manifest that among these three ecosystems, the ecological service function value of grassland ecosystem is the highest and therefore should be compensated mainly.