Improving farmers’ livelihoods through the eco-compensation of forest carbon sinks

Promoting forest carbon sinks (FCSs) offsetting is a crucial way to improve the farmers' livelihoods, promote low-carbon rural development. There is no consensus on the factors affecting farmers' willingness to accept (WTA) and enterprises' willingness to pay (WTP), it makes the benefits of FCSs face difficulties such as unstable eco-compensation financing channels and difficult to establish standards. This study estimates carbon stocks, analyzes WTA and WTP, explores eco-compensation standards of the FCSs and its influencing factors, which are verified by questionnaires and interviews with 360 farmers and 117 enterprise managers on Mizhi County of Shaanxi Province in China as a case. The results show that the WTA was influenced by individual characteristics, climate change perceptions, FCSs perceptions, and policy participation. The WTP was influenced by managerial position, subjective perceptions, choice preferences, behavioural implementation intentions, and policy incentives. The contingent valuation method was used to estimate an interval value of [106.92 $/hm2, 142.01 $/hm2] $/hm2 for the WTA. The value of FCSs in the case area increased from $1.40 million in 2010 to $9.92 million in 2020, which led to the determination of the eco-compensation standard is $226.90/hm2 for farmers. The study aims to guarantee the farmers’ livelihood through eco-compensation, which not only effectively realizes the value of FCSs, but also helps enterprises to increase the WTP for increasing FCSs, which in turn helps the local government to promote the regional FCSs trading to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality.