Research On The Effects Of Grain For Green Project On Vegetation Coverage In Guizhou Province

The Grain for Green Project(GGP),with the widest coverage and the largest investment scale,has been mainly launched for ecological restoration and environmental governance.Meanwhile,this program also generates socio-economic benefits by affecting the transfer of rural labor force and regional economic development.According to the statistics,fiscal investment of the GGP has reached 517.4 billion yuan,government has provided the vast number of “ticket” supports with the peasant households who had involved in the program per year.Therefore,it is necessary to clarify the realization degree of expected ecological goal and the contribution of the GGP to ecological construction with the constant input of fiscal funds.It not only helps to evaluate the results of the GGP,but also provides a reference for improving the efficiency of fiscal investment of the GGP and realizing the sustainable development of the GGP objectively.The GGP has been implemented in Guizhou Province from 2000.Government in this area offered food and cash subsidies to farmers who have returned farmland.By doing so,the land use would change in the form of the increase of forest and grass to alleviate water and soil erosion and achieve the focal goal of vegetation restoration.This study firstly used descriptive statistical analysis methods to clarify the spatiotemporal evolution and correlation of the fiscal investment of the GGP and NDVI.Secondly,this study built panel-data fixed effect model with dummy variables to measure the contribution of the GGP to vegetation coverage in Guizhou Province from 2000 to 2017,and discussed the difference in the implementation effect of the GGP in different spatial dimensions.Finally,we considered GDP as the threshold variable to divide Guizhou into areas with greater or lesser contributions of the GGP to NDVI.Furthermore,estimating the fiscal investment scale of the GGP by calculating the contributions between fiscal investment and economic development.The results shown that:(1)The vegetation coverage in Guizhou has been greatly improved after implementing the GGP.The significant positive correlation exists between the fiscal investment of the GGP and NDVI,the correlation coefficient reaches 0.8132.The distribution of fiscal investment is high in the Northwest and low in the southeast.From the perspective of NDVI,improved areas of NDVI are mainly distributed in Tongren,Bijie,Anshun and Qiannan.Degraded areas are small and mainly distributed in Xingyi of Qianxinan and city subdivision of Guiyang.(2)Implementation effects of the GGP exists differences in different spatial dimensions.From the regional perspective,the fiscal investment effect of the GGP in non-rocky desertification region was better than rocky desertification region;From the perspective of functional areas,the fiscal investment of the GGP in the key development areas has the largest marginal contribution to NDVI,which is higher than the key ecological function areas and main agricultural production areas;From the county perspective,except for Baiyun,Wanshan,Yuping,81 counties with effective fiscal investment of the GGP in Guizhou Province showed the distribution characteristics of “double central radiation”.(3)The relationship between the fiscal investment of the GGP and NDVI shows an obvious “inverted U-shaped”.Taking the impact of regional economic development on vegetation activities into account,GDP and fiscal investment are used as threshold variables and core independent variables to conduct threshold effect regression respectively.By doing so,the single threshold value of 0.303 can be obtained.To be more specific,counties(districts)whose GDP are less than 3.03 billion yuan are the regions with higher marginal contribution to vegetation cover;whereas,the contribution in the areas with GDP higher than 3.03 billion yuan is relatively small.(4)Government should guarantee effective investment according to the level of socio-economic development without the decline of the ecological quality.Specifically speaking,126 Yuan should be invested into the vegetation recovery with every 10000 Yuan increasing in GDP to maintain the existing ecological quality.(5)The government needs to improve the appraisal system of investment performance compensation funds should be distributed to the areas with high efficiency of fiscal investment when the fiscal investments area the same or similar.Moreover,the areas with inferior investment effect should be supervised and governed.