Ecological compensation for large water projects based on ecological footprint theory: a case study in China

AbstractLarge water projects have become important ways to alleviate the water stress in China, which inevitably lead to large quantity of ecological immigrants. Reasonable policies on ecological compensation are extremely important for the realization of sustainable ecological projects. Traditional methods fail to calculate the reasonable and sustainable compensation for local residents. Taking the South-North Water Transfer Middle Route Project as an example, we suggested a new model based on the ecological footprint theory to calculate the losses of ecological immigrants and provided a more reasonable compensation amount. Results reflect that compensation quantity for the cropland, grazing land, forest land, fishing ground and built-up are recommended as 4318.53yuan/a, 223.05yuan/a, 308.41yuan/a, 904.69yuan/a and 56651.62yuan/a, respectively. This paper may be served as an example for direct the ecological compensation in developing countries