This paper provides an overview of China’s climate mitigation policy related to the forestry sector, with a special focus on the development of carbon forests which are established to mitigate climate change. A total of 3.5 million ha of carbon forest were planted in the past decade. In recent years, the number of Voluntary Emission Reduction forest carbon projects has increased rapidly. The main challenges for future development of carbon forests under market mechanisms include increasing costs, uncertainty in the future supply and demand for China-certified emission reduction, and potential disputes between households and project developers.

Community-based ecotourism (CBET) has become a popular strategy to alleviate the contradiction between ecological protection and community development. As the stakeholders of CBET, the community’s participation in the planning process is of great importance to in order to realize the sustainability of CBET. Taking a community in Wolong Nature Reserve as a case study, in this study we developed a decision-making participation mechanism based on the participatory scenario method. Through this mechanism, community stakeholders can effectively reach consensus with other stakeholders on the planning of CBET in the future. The results showed that community participation in the planning process can mean decisions are more likely to reflect their interests. They unanimously proposed that future CBET must adhere to the basic principle of protecting biodiversity and must maximize the welfare of the community. Moreover, achieving the sustainability of CBET in protected areas requires the cooperation of all stakeholders.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gained attention in the forestry sector, especially among Chinese forestry companies, which faces serious challenges. This study explores the CSR activities of Chinese forestry companies listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges and analyzes how they differ from their international counterparts. CSR contents, levels, strategies, and determinants are examined through a quantitative content analysis and statistical analyses. The results show that Chinese forestry companies’ CSR contents, like their international counterparts, are diverse and include the environment, employees, communities, general social issues, consumers and products, investors and creditors, governments, and supply chains. Both of them focus on environmental and employee responsibility and pay less attention to community responsibility; however, their CSR priority activities differ. While Chinese companies rank employee responsibility activities first and environmental activities second, their international counterparts prioritize environmental activities over employee responsibility. Chinese forestry companies have four types of CSR strategies—reactive, focused, opportunistic, and proactive—and the majority of these companies adopt reactive strategies. Only a few Chinese forestry companies choose proactive strategies. Forest resources partially explain the variance in the levels of government responsibility among forestry companies, and the industry type influences the levels of corporate environmental responsibility.

The economic contribution of forest resources to the communities surrounding nature reserves cannot be ignored. The method for which to find a forest resource utilization path to balance the contradiction between local farmers’ economic development and ecological protection in the development of nature reserves is important. However, little attention has been given to the effect of forest resource users’ behavioral preferences on forest resource utilization. This study selected Wolong Nature Reserve as a case study and randomly interviewed different stakeholders with semi-structured questionnaires to investigate the differences in forest resource utilization patterns among stakeholders with different behavioral preferences. According to the results of multi-attribute decision analysis with behavioral preference, stakeholders form different behavioral preferences by judging their own resource endowment. With a change of in the behavioral preference value λ, when the behavioral preference of stakeholders is more pessimistic (λ = 0.1), cautious (λ = 0.3), or neutral (λ = 0.5), they are more inclined to choose the economically dominant forest resource utilization mode; when the behavioral preference of stakeholders is optimistic (λ = 0.7) or even radical (λ = 0.9), they choose the eco-economic or eco-dominant forest resource utilization mode, respectively. This study confirms that stakeholders’ behavioral preferences have an important impact on forest resource utilization patterns. Therefore, policy making should focus on improving the economic benefits of forest resources and providing alternative livelihoods, which will change the resource endowment of the stakeholders of nature reserve, guide them to turn to relatively optimistic behavioral preferences, enhance their awareness and motivation of ecological protection, and thereby improve forest conservation outcomes.

Religious belief play an irreplaceable role in the protection of natural resources. This paper explores the influence of religious beliefs on the Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) collection behaviors of farmers, in order to provide new ideas on how to rationally use natural resources for nature reserves. Based on survey data of giant panda reserves in Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces in China, we analyze the differences of NTFPs collection between farmers with or without religious beliefs and those with different religious beliefs. Our results show that: (i) The SUR-Probit method can be used to overcome the endogeneity problem of the model and test the causal effect between religious belief and NTFPs collection; (ii) farmers with religious beliefs collect NTFPs to a lesser extent; and (iii) the collection of NTFPs by farmers with different religious beliefs can be distinguished. The important role of religious belief in the use of natural resources has often been neglected in previous studies. In our research, we find that religious belief can indeed guide the individual choice of resource utilization behavior, to a certain extent, ultimately achieving the mutual co-ordination of ecological protection and economic development, which can also be used as a reference for policy-making.