Understanding the Effects of China’s Agro-Environmental Policies on Rural Households’ Labor and Land Allocation with a Spatially Explicit Agent-Based Model

Understanding household labor and land allocation decisions under agro-environmental policies is challenging due to complex human-environment interactions. Here, we developed a spatially explicit agent-based model based on spatial and socioeconomic data to simulate households’ land and labor allocation decisions and investigated the impacts of two forest restoration and conservation programs and one agricultural subsidy program in rural China. Simulation outputs revealed that the forest restoration program accelerates labor out-migration and cropland shrink, while the forest conservation program promotes livelihood diversification via increasing non-farm employment. Meanwhile, the agricultural subsidy program keeps labor for cultivation on land parcels with good quality, but appears less effective for preventing marginal croplands from being abandoned. The policy effects on labor allocation substantially differ between rules based on bounded rational and empirical knowledge of defining household decisions, particularly on sending labor out-migrants and engaging in local off-farm jobs. Land use patterns showed that the extent to which households pursue economic benefits through shrinking cultivated land is generally greater under bounded rationality than empirical knowledge. Findings demonstrate nonlinear social-ecological impacts of the agro-environmental policies through time, which can deviate from expectations due to complex interplays between households and land. This study also suggests that the spatial agent-based model can represent adaptive decision-making and interactions of human agents and their interactions in dynamic social and physical environments.