Previous studies on China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP), one of world’s largest Payments for Ecosystem Services policy, have indicated the lack of an operational human-environment system framework to enable the integrated assessment of ecological and socioeconomic long-term effects of SLCP. In particular, it is crucial to assess whether SLCP can facilitate labor reallocation, particularly from agriculture to non-agriculture sector, to ensure ecological and socioeconomic sustainability after the program completes.

To address the abovementioned challenges, we built a spatial agent-based land-use model that was empirically calibrated for a desertified region in northeast China. The model constitutes landscape agents having ecological attributes and submodels of crop yield, land degradation, and land restoration and household agents having socioeconomic attributes and land-use decision submodels. The agents’ interaction mechanisms are regulated as per external policy settings in order to assess the mutual ecological and socioeconomic impacts of SLCP. The effectiveness of SLCP in labor reallocation was evaluated using an embedded adaptive decision-making mechanism. The model’s operational capability was demonstrated through scenario analyses.