Landscapes generate a wide range of valuable ecosystem services, and valuation of these services provides support for land-use decisions. The most common approach to identifying these tradeoffs is called payment for ecosystem services (PES), and when this approach is carefully applied, it has the potential to enhance how ecosystem services are used and improve their protection by signaling the development of a scarcity of environmental resources. However, this approach often ignores the opportunity costs of these services, thereby making the net benefit of the ecosystem services and their responses to land-use change unclear. Therefore, there must be a fuller accounting for both the costs and the benefits of various alternatives, and such an accounting must become the basis for developing policy, reaching ethical decisions, and taking appropriate actions. Through the evaluation of net value of ecosystem services, we can compare the maximum net benefits of alternative land uses, thereby providing basis for decision-making during land use planning, industrial and agricultural programs and ecological and environmental restoration programs as well as socioeconomic and national economic development planning. To address this need, a new approach based on determining the net value of ecosystem services (NES) should be developed to provide a more rigorous comparison of the consequences of land-use change. This approach reveals large differences between the values of a given land use when opportunity costs are and are not accounted for. To illustrate the new approach, here, we use the example of the Beijing Plains Afforestation Project to illustrate the benefits of accounting for the direct and opportunity costs of alternative land uses based on changes in ecosystem services, thereby determining the net value of these services and providing better support for land-use planning and policy development. For this project, we calculated the NES resulting from ecological restoration by comparing the current program of restoration via afforestation with alternatives such as restoration based on the conservation of natural vegetation and management of a farmland ecosystem. The results shows that the ecosystem service values of creating a large-scale artificial forest ecosystem through afforestation may be strongly negative in the short run when we account for the opportunity costs of this strategy. Evaluating the long-term effects is currently not possible, as this will require data from monitoring the afforestation project to determine how the ecosystem services values provided by the artificial forest evolve over time. Therefore, the results of such approaches absolutely will exaggerate the value of natural and artificial ecosystem as well as the economic significance of related measures to maintain and restore the ecosystem and will cause the disruption of the land use planning, affecting the scientific and feasible planning of national economic development. Given the complexity of predicted future climate change and the wide range of landscape-, regional-, and global-scale factors that affect ecosystem services, managers must work harder to identify and quantify the tradeoffs among ecological and socioeconomic benefits, and particularly the trade-offs between short-term benefits (which often drive political decisions) and long-term benefits (which determine the sustainability of human civilization). The challenges for future research will be to account for the problems described in this paper, particularly in terms of the trade-offs among competing objectives, identifying and quantifying opportunity costs for all stakeholders, and providing improved versions of the NES model that account for more factors, using more reliable and fine-grained data.