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69. Valuing wetland resources in China

Full Title:

Valuing the role of living aquatic resources to rural livelihoods in multiple-use seasonally inundated wetlands of Yunnan and Henan provinces China for improved governance

Project Summary:

In many developing countries, large rural populations are concentrated around seasonally flooded wetlands because of their high productivity. These wetland environments provide a resource base for millions of people, particularly the poor, for whom these areas are a source of water, food, livelihood, animal feeds, and materials for their basic existence. Yet these valuable, common property resources are under threat, degraded because of poor management, overuse and land conversion, resulting in often severe negative consequences for the poor.

Part of the problem arises from the serious undervaluation of wetland resources. Traditional approaches to water productivity analysis focus on agricultural productivity and fail to capture the full range of benefits from water, including living aquatic resources (LARs) such as fish, invertebrates and plants. These resources are of particular significance to the livelihoods and nutrition of the rural poor, particularly at the subsistence level. However, official statistics largely underestimate the value of LARs because of the informal nature of living aquatic resource use. As a result, land and water use planners often consider wetland areas to be marginal lands of low productivity, and fail to give incorporate their value into land use and water policy and planning initiatives.

There is clearly a need to address the current imbalance in water productivity valuation, and reduce the bias towards agricultural productivity. This project responds to this need by proposing to develop an innovative valuation tool for water productivity assessment, highlighting the significance of small-scale wetland LAR production to rural livelihoods. The project will develop a new approach to wetland valuation, which will include LARs as a principle contributor to water productivity. By assessing the institutional context of wetland resource use and making a detailed investigation of how benefits from wetlands are shared among resource users, the approach also makes new and innovative contributions to the water productivity debate. The significance of LARs to the well-being of women, who are often the most important wetland resource users, gathering animals and plants to supplement household food consumption or to feed small livestock, will also be stressed.

Based on two case studies in China, the Upper Mekong and the Yellow River, with contrasting ecosystem, socioeconomic and political characteristics, the project will assess the value of aquatic production to different stakeholders over two complete seasonal cycles. The project will characterize the environmental context and conduct a detailed situation analysis to build a thorough understanding of the social, economic and institutional context of aquatic resource use and management. Particular attention will be paid to the institutional context and traditional and formal use rights. The valuation tool will be based on situation analysis and a Total Economic Valuation (TEV) approach, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, and will feed into multicriteria evaluation for decision making analysis.

The value of the project lies in its contribution to pro-poor policy development. It is expected that outputs will lead to the development of land and water use policies which ensure more equitable resource sharing arrangements amongst stakeholders, with direct benefits to marginal groups.

Project Proposal:

Technical Submission (XLS 135Kb)
Annex A: CVs (PDF 192Kb)
Annex B: Bibliography
Annex C: Objective Tree (XLS 30Kb)
Annex D: Gantt Chart (XLS 32Kb)
Annex E: Project Team (PDF 73Kb)
Annex F: Stakeholder and Beneficiaries (PDF 73Kb)
Annex G: Environmental Impact (PDF 66Kb)