Assessment of Sustainable Livelihood and Geographic Detection of Settlement Sites in Ethnically Contiguous Poverty-Stricken Areas in the Aba Prefecture, China

Yanguo Liu,Chengmin Huang,Qing Wang,Junwei Luan,Mingtao Ding

doi:10.3390/ijgi7010016

Abstract

The Chinese government aims to deal with poverty by 2020 for people living in ethnic and rural regions, including mountainous ethnic regions with the highest concentration of poverty and chronic poverty. Based on a sustainable livelihood Framework, five capitals and 33 evaluation indices of livelihood were built, and 13 counties’ resources of the Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture were compared in order to calculate the degree of poverty. Topographic factors index of settlement sites (TFIS) were constructed by eight topographic factors, and diagnoses of the dominant factors of differentiation of 2699 settlements were calculated by using the geographical detector model to establish the poverty alleviation policies and models for different regions. The results showed that the livelihood capital evaluation indices were different (0.56–1.88), and natural capitals (mean value 1.56) had obvious advantages, but physical (mean value 0.56), financial (mean value 0.78), and human capital were lower (mean value 0.93), limiting the rate of transforming the ecological resources advantage into the economy. In the TFIS, the settlement points indicate topographic factors of natural breakpoint classification superposition, including elevation, slope, relief amplitude, surface incision, variance coefficient in elevation, surface roughness, distance to roads, and distance to rivers. These are within the 8–34 range, and their power determinant value to TFIS are 0.02, 0.70, 0.77, 0.76, 0.51, 0.66, 0.06, and 0.09. Livelihood capital evaluation indices and TFIS classification one (8–14) are positively correlated, and negative correlation (22–26 and 27–34) is at the 0.05 level. The county's poverty alleviation measures and development under different livelihood indices and TFIS indicate that the ecotourism industry has become the inevitable choice for promoting rapid and coordinated development of economy, society, and the environment in ethnic regions.

Highlights

Poverty is both a worldwide problem that hinders human survival and development, and a spatially heterogeneous phenomenon, i.e., poor people tend to be clustered in specific places [1,2,3], which is evident in minority regions of China compared with their important geographical positions [4,5]
Special ecological environments, resource advantages, and the internal connection between development and poverty alleviation, the evaluation index system of livelihood capital was built in minority contiguous poverty-stricken areas from the perspective of evaluating sustainable livelihood
In terms of the social capital rating, especially considering the two factors of the growth rate of tourist income and contribution of tourism revenue to GDP, Jiuzhaigou received the highest score (3.56), and Rangtang County the lowest owing to its alpine climate and landscapes

Summary

Introduction

Poverty is both a worldwide problem that hinders human survival and development, and a spatially heterogeneous phenomenon, i.e., poor people tend to be clustered in specific places [1,2,3], which is evident in minority regions of China compared with their important geographical positions [4,5]. Potential opportunities for poverty eradication, as well as how to use the capital and livelihood strategy to pursue the desired result, were identified [8,9,13,14,15,16,17,18,19] This framework connected the right tools to household assets and livelihood activities, resulting in many other socio-economic components being revealed and becoming the quantitative analysis framework of the current situation in impoverished areas [3,5,8]. Special ecological environments, resource advantages, and the internal connection between development and poverty alleviation, the evaluation index system of livelihood capital was built in minority contiguous poverty-stricken areas from the perspective of evaluating sustainable livelihood. These evaluation indices were used for comparative purposes between the poverty degree and the development potential in order to provide the basis of strategies for poverty reduction and economic development

Methods

Results

Conclusion