Acta Geographica Sinica ›› 2019, Vol. 74 ›› Issue (5): 1040-1057.doi: 10.11821/dlxb201905015

• Land Use and Ecosystem Services • Previous Articles    

Revaluation of ecosystem services in inland river basins of China: Based on meta-regression analysis

YAN Yan1,YAO Liuyang2,LANG Liangming1,3,ZHAO Minjuan1,3()   

  1. 1. College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, Shaanxi, China;
    2. International Business School, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an 710119, China
    3. Sixth Industrial Research Institute, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, Shaanxi, China;
  • Received:2017-11-03 Revised:2019-02-26 Online:2019-05-25 Published:2019-05-24
  • Contact: ZHAO Minjuan E-mail:zhao@nwsuaf.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    Major Program of National Social Science Foundation of China(15ZDA052);National Natural Science Foundation of China(71373209)

Abstract:

Incorporating the economic value of river basin ecosystem services into cost-benefit analysis is the key to solving environmental problems and achieving a sustainable allocation of water resources in river basins. In recent years, with the increase in valuation literature, there has been much controversy in terms of the amount of value and its influencing factors, which has made it difficult to apply these research results to management practices. In this paper, the meta-regression analysis is first applied to the valuation of ecosystem services in the inland river basins of China. The results show that the valuation can be significantly affected by characteristics of the four aspects of valuation research, specifically: object, respondents, measurement method and publications. Among them, the valuation of both the Shiyang River and the Tarim River is significantly higher than that of the Heihe River. The valuation of the upstream portion is significantly higher than that of the middle and lower reaches. The value assessed by the dichotomous choice contingent valuation method is not significantly different from that of the choice experiments. However, it is significantly higher than values obtained by other contingent valuation methods. In addition, valuation over time shows a "declining effect" of 2%-3% per year and valuation in journal literature is significantly higher than that in other forms of literature. By using the n-1 data splitting technique, we applied the results of the meta-regression to out-of-sample benefit transfer, evaluated it, and found a median error of 27.12%. Compared with the existing research, the results are in an acceptable range. Therefore, the meta-regression analysis used in this paper is applicable to the valuation of the ecosystem services of the policy sites in the inland river basins of China.

Key words: ecosystem services valuation, meta-regression analysis, n-1 data splitting technique, inland river basins, China