The effects of China’s Grain for Green program on migration and remittance

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Claudio O. Delang

<p>The Grain for Green (GfG) is the largest reforestation program of the world. It involved payments to farmers to convert their marginal farmland. Many farmers decided to migrate. This paper looks at some of the household features associated with migration by GfG-participants, and the importance of remittances to those who remained behind. Fieldwork for this research was carried out in Pengshui County in Chongqing Municipality. Several variables affect migration, including education, land ownership and household size. For most households, remittances consist of over 90 percent of all household incomes, but the amount remitted tends to level off when it reaches a certain size, regardless of the number of household members who migrated.</p>

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Claudio O. Delang

<p>The Grain for Green (GfG) is the largest reforestation program of the world. It involved payments to farmers to convert their marginal farmland. Many farmers decided to migrate. This paper looks at some of the household features associated with migration by GfG-participants, and the importance of remittances to those who remained behind. Fieldwork for this research was carried out in Pengshui County in Chongqing Municipality. Several variables affect migration, including education, land ownership and household size. For most households, remittances consist of over 90 percent of all household incomes, but the amount remitted tends to level off when it reaches a certain size, regardless of the number of household members who migrated.</p>


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. e0245009
Author(s):  
Karynna Okabe-Miyamoto ◽  
Dunigan Folk ◽  
Sonja Lyubomirsky ◽  
Elizabeth W. Dunn

To slow the transmission of COVID-19, countries around the world have implemented social distancing and stay-at-home policies—potentially leading people to rely more on household members for their sense of closeness and belonging. To understand the conditions under which people felt the most connected, we examined whether changes in overall feelings of social connection varied by household size and composition. In two pre-registered studies, undergraduates in Canada (NStudy 1 = 548) and adults primarily from the U.S. and U.K. (NStudy 2 = 336) reported their perceived social connection once before and once during the pandemic. In both studies, living with a partner robustly and uniquely buffered shifts in social connection during the first phases of the pandemic (βStudy 1 = .22, βStudy 2 = .16). In contrast, neither household size nor other aspects of household composition predicted changes in connection. We discuss implications for future social distancing policies that aim to balance physical health with psychological health.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karynna Okabe-Miyamoto ◽  
Dunigan Parker Folk ◽  
Sonja Lyubomirsky ◽  
Elizabeth Warren Dunn

In an effort to slow down the transmission of COVID-19, countries around the world implemented social distancing and stay-at-home policies—potentially compelling people to rely more on household members for their sense of closeness and belonging. To understand the conditions under which people felt the most connected, we examined whether changes in overall feelings of social connection varied as a function of household size and household composition. In two pre-registered studies, undergraduates in Canada (NStudy 1 = 548) and adults primarily from the U.S. and U.K. (NStudy 2 = 336) reported on their perceived social connection once before and once during the pandemic. In both studies, living with a romantic partner robustly and uniquely buffered shifts in social connection during the first phases of the pandemic (βStudy 1 = .22, βStudy 2 = .16). In contrast, neither household size nor other aspects of household composition predicted changes in connection. We discuss implications for future social distancing policies that aim to balance physical health with psychological health.


Author(s):  
Sijing Qiu ◽  
Jian Peng

Abstract Effective forestation policies are urgently required across the globe under the initiative of UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Rather than simply planting trees, such initiatives involve complex components of societal and biophysical systems. However, the underlying pathways by which forestation influences the ecological outcomes are not well understood, especially lacking a unified quantification framework. In this study, such a framework was developed to reveal the pathways in which reforestation programs influenced ecological outcomes through identifying the linkages among reforestation efforts, societal changes, land system changes, and ecological outcomes. The framework was applied in the reforestation program of Grain for Green Program (GFGP), to explore that how the GFGP influenced vegetation dynamics and ecosystem functioning in Guizhou Province of China through direct and indirect pathways. Two independent remote-sensing-based indicators: the enhanced vegetation index (EVI), derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), and gross primary production (GPP), obtained from the Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) fine resolution dataset GOSIF, were combined with inventory data and land use maps to detect changes in social and ecological outcomes. Using the Structural Equation Model (SEM) to perform the framework, the results showed that the GFGP positively contributed to the increasing greenness and GPP of the study area through the direct conservation pathway. Although the implementation of GFGP encouraged outmigration and led to a decrease in farmland area, GFGP on greenness and GPP showed negative indirect effects because of the difficulty of reforestation during land-use conversion from farmland to forest land. This study revealed divergent impacts of the reforestation program through multiple pathways, which could provide valuable information for other parts of the globe to design ecological restoration policies more precisely.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 4762
Author(s):  
Xiufen Li ◽  
Yichen Tian ◽  
Tian Gao ◽  
Lei Jin ◽  
Shuangtian Li ◽  
...  

The effects of forest restoration on ecosystem services and their trade-offs are increasingly discussed by environmental managers and ecologists, but few demonstrations have analyzed ecosystem service trade-offs with a view to informing afforestation choices. Here, we examined how the Grain for Green Program (GGP), an ambitious reforestation program in China, affected ecosystem services. We quantified regulating services and provisioning service in the potential scenarios, which were developed to improve ecosystem services better. The results indicated the GGP drove 14.5% of land-use/land-cover from 2000 to 2015, and all the regulating services increased. Prioritizing reforestations in steep-sloped and riparian farmlands can promote flood mitigation, water purification, and soil retention services by 62.7%, 25.5%, and 216.1% as compared with 2015 levels, respectively, suggesting that the improvements strongly depend on afforestation locations. Driven by the new GGP policy, a high proportion of economic forest increased provisioning service (272.2%), but at the expense of decreases in soil retention (−25.1%), flood mitigation (−11.4%), water purification (−36.6%), and carbon storage (−48.5%). We identified a suitable scenario that would reduce the trade-offs, which associated with afforestation types and their spatial allocation. Identifying priority areas of afforestation types can inform the GGP policy to assure sustainable and broader benefits.


Viruses ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1076
Author(s):  
Anne Gégout Petit ◽  
Hélène Jeulin ◽  
Karine Legrand ◽  
Nicolas Jay ◽  
Agathe Bochnakian ◽  
...  

The World Health Organisation recommends monitoring the circulation of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). We investigated anti–SARS-CoV-2 total immunoglobulin (IgT) antibody seroprevalence and in vitro sero-neutralization in Nancy, France, in spring 2020. Individuals were randomly sampled from electoral lists and invited with household members over 5 years old to be tested for anti–SARS-CoV-2 (IgT, i.e., IgA/IgG/IgM) antibodies by ELISA (Bio-rad); the sero-neutralization activity was evaluated on Vero CCL-81 cells. Among 2006 individuals, the raw seroprevalence was 2.1% (95% confidence interval 1.5 to 2.9), was highest for 20- to 34-year-old participants (4.7% (2.3 to 8.4)), within than out of socially deprived area (2.5% vs. 1%, p = 0.02) and with than without intra-family infection (p < 10−6). Moreover, 25% of participants presented at least one COVID-19 symptom associated with SARS-CoV-2 positivity (p < 10−13), with highly discriminant anosmia or ageusia (odds ratio 27.8 [13.9 to 54.5]); 16.3% (6.8 to 30.7) of seropositive individuals were asymptomatic. Positive sero-neutralization was demonstrated in vitro for 31/43 seropositive subjects. Regarding the very low seroprevalence, a preventive effect of the lockdown in March 2020 can be assumed for the summer, but a second COVID-19 wave, as expected, could be subsequently observed in this poorly immunized population.


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