Integrated evaluation of payments for ecosystem services programs in China: a systematic review

Introduction: During the past two decades, payments for ecosystem services (PES) program has become a popular conservation paradigm for realigning socioeconomic costs and benefits among different stakeholders. As billions of investment flows into the natural capital pool, there is growing interest to understand the ecological, economic, and social outcomes of PES programs. China is one of the countries that extensively implements PES programs. Although there is a growing interest to perform impact evaluation of China's massive PES programs, it is unclear that what existing literature has done, has not done, and should do in the future. Therefore, to guide further research and practices, we conduct a systematic review of studies on China's PES programs. Results: Our review shows that there are growing impact evaluation studies of PES programs in China. However, the spatial and ecosystem distributions of existing studies are quite uneven. Most case studies were poorly designed, rarely quantified, and evaluated without sophisticated methods. Among the three dimensions of ecological effectiveness, economic efficiency, and social equity, economic efficiency is the least studied. Discussion and Conclusion: We further discuss the challenges and opportunities and provide insights for future research. To improve the understanding and management of natural capital, we call for mainstreaming impact evaluation of ecosystem service policies in China and beyond following the state-of-art procedures.