Remittance from migrants reinforces forest recovery for China’s reforestation policy

Forests play a key role in the mitigation of global warming and provide many other vital ecosystem goods and services. However, as forest continues to vanish at an alarming rate from the surface of the planet, the world desperately needs knowledge on what contributes to forest preservation and restoration. Migration, a hallmark of globalization, is widely recognized as a main driver of forest recovery and poverty alleviation. Here, we show that remittance from migrants reinforces forest recovery that would otherwise be unlikely with mere migration, realizing the additionality of payments for ecosystem services for China’s largest reforestation policy, the Conversion of Cropland to Forest Program (CCFP). Guided by the framework that integrates telecoupling and coupled natural and human systems, we investigate forest-livelihood dynamics under the CCFP through the lens of rural out-migration and remittance using both satellite remote sensing imagery and household survey data in two representative sites of rural China. Results show that payments from the CCFP significantly increases the probability of sending remittance by out-migrants to their origin households. We observe substantial forest regeneration and greening surrounding households receiving remittance but forest decline and browning in proximity to households with migrants but not receiving remittance, as measured by forest coverage and the Enhanced Vegetation Index derived from space-borne remotely sensed data. The primary mechanism is that remittance reduces the reliance of households on natural capital from forests, particularly fuelwood, allowing forests near the households to recover. The shares of the estimated ecological and economic additionality induced by remittance are 2.0% (1.4%∼3.8%) and 9.7% (5.0%∼15.2%), respectively, to the baseline of the reforested areas enrolled in CCFP and the payments received by the participating households. Remittance-facilitated forest regeneration amounts to 12.7% (6.0%∼18.0%) of the total new forest gained during the 2003–2013 in China. Our results demonstrate that remittance constitutes a telecoupling mechanism between rural areas and cities over long distances, influencing the local social-ecological gains that the forest policy intended to stimulate. Thus, supporting remittance-sending migrants in cities can be an effective global warming mitigation strategy.