Mental health value of parks in China

Biological conservation relies on protected areas, which need funding for acquisition and management. Economic valuation of ecosystem services contributes political and economic support for government budget allocations. One politically powerful cultural ecosystem service is improved mental health of park visitors, known as health services value or HSV. Previous HSV estimates were extrapolated from a single country, Australia. Here we provide a more precise global estimate by: focussing on China as the largest newly-industrialised economy; comparing mental health across 25 parks throughout China, using the Personal Wellbeing Index, PWI; and measuring PWI at representative and heavily-visited Shennongjia National Park, and a gateway counterpart. We calculated ΔPWI as a function of park visit rate, controlled for socioeconomic, demographic and physical health factors. This yielded ΔPWI∼2.75 % for China, as in Australia. Published data show that: the population of China is 1.4 billion; the proportion visiting parks is 32 % (cf ∼70 % in developed nations); and mean national financial value per quality-adjusted life-year is US$63,500 (cf ∼US$200,000). Parks HSV for China is thus US$0.78 trillion per annum. Scaling up to include India, Brazil and Russia, total HSV for the newly-industrialised bloc is US$1.13 trillion per annum, ∼5 % of GDP. Including previous data for developed nations, where HSV is ∼8 % of GDP, yields a new global estimate for parks HSV of US$ 5.1 ± 2.0 trillion per annum, 6 % of global GDP, substantially more precise than previous estimates. For national and local conservation applications, the next step will be to scale down to individual parks, ecosystems, and species.