Abstract:Understanding the economic value of grassland ecosystem restoration as well as how people perceive its role in providing service can provide insight into the grassland protection and the kinds of policies needed to ensure sustainable uses. We used WTP (maximum willingness to pay for grassland restoration) and WTA (minimum willingness to accept for overloading livestock in grassland) in one questionnaire and Anchored Payment Card (APC) as their eliciting tools to estimate the restoration cost of Maqu grassland, which is one of the important parts in Tibetan Plateau ecosystems. The main results are: ① In 525 families, about 75% (394 families) selected the WTP approach and only 24.6% (131 families) selected the WTA approach. For local people, the reference is that most of them judge the rich or the poor just by the number of livestock that family has. Holding on this traditional opinion, people seldom sell the livestock and wait until they become old enough, which leading to the number of livestock increasing continuously and giving raise to the grassland degradation. ② If we assumed that the restoration of Maqu grassland ecosystem needs 10 years and divided the restoring period into two stages, then the former 4 years cost was 3.4×108RMB, the average cost was 0.85×108RMB per year. While the whole cost of latter 6 years was 0.126×108RMB,average cost was 0.021×108RMB per year. Within the total cost, the payment value (WTP) was only about 6 %, the compensated value (WTA) was 94%. These suggested that the restoration of Maqu Grassland should mainly adopt the measurement of accelerating the superfluous livestock out of the Grassland. Then the pressure of Grassland can be mitigated, and its natural resilience could be achieved. The result also shows that the method of the combined WTP and WTA in one CV (Contingent Valuation) survey is very useful in estimating the cost of environmental improvement projects.