In 1998 the Chinese government implemented the Natural Forest Protection Program, NFPP, which included logging restrictions, protected areas, replanting, and a range of other policies aimed at safeguarding the state of the country’s forests and reducing the risk of erosion and flooding.
A second phase of this policy is currently being discussed. In this paper, we use contingent valuation to estimate the WTP for maintaining the program among the inhabitants in Heilongjiang Province in northern China. Our results show that, even with fairly conservative assumptions, the aggregated WTP for maintaining the program for another five years is some 3.24 billion Yuan per year. This can be compared to the current cost of the program in the province, which is some 1.57 billion Yuan per year.
