Abstract
Land degradation, especially natural forest land degradation (NFLD), is a severe environmental concern in China. This natural disaster itself and its derivative control policies have caused some impacts on surrounding farmers’ livelihood level and strategies, but the literature on the sustainable livelihood of different households in NFLD vulnerability is limited, and there is an urgent need to bridge the gap and conduct studies on the sustainable livelihood of Changting, Libo, Lixian, Menghai and Wuxi, the typical NFLD-prone areas in China. A new livelihood sustainability index (LSI) including livelihood asset, livelihood strategy and sustainability engagement is constructed to assess the basic situation. The results showed that: (1) The overall LSI of five NFLD areas was not high, and the social, financial and natural assets, in particular, were relatively low. A disparity was found among the five areas, and the rank sequence of the LSI value was sorted in a descending order: Changting > Menghai > Libo > Lixian > Wuxi. (2) In detail, farmers in Changting had the relative highest LSI because of the inherent high value of livelihood assets, which constrain the scores of the livelihood strategy and sustainability engagement. (3) Households in Libo, Menghai and Lixian had middle level LSI scores. The relative low livelihood assets in Libo and Menghai drove parts of local farmers to carry out off-farm/forestry employment, leading to high scores of livelihood strategy, while farmers in Lixian had lower livelihood diversification scores and higher sustainability engagement due to their working content for the local forestry bureau. (4) The low scores of the livelihood asset and sustainability engagement restricted farmers in Wuxi. A discussion of LSI in the NFLD vulnerability was conducted to determine the characteristics and analyze the reasons. Accordingly, targeted policy recommendations were proposed to realize a sustainable livelihood in NFLD areas.
Highlights
At present, land degradation, especially the natural forest land degradation (NFLD), is one of the global environmental concerns that influences everyone, through food insecurity, climate change, natural disasters, and the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services such as soil and water conservation [1,2]
The results showed a large disparity among the five NFLD areas in terms of the sustainability engagement index value (Table 10)
This study has been an attempt to examine the livelihood sustainability of local farmers in the vulnerability of natural forest land degradation (NFLD), given that the natural disaster and its related conservation policy has caused some impact on their livelihood assets and shifted their choice of livelihood strategies, which raised the need of sustainable engagement activities as an adaptive coping mechanism or win-win solution between livelihood improvement and environmental protection
Summary
Land degradation, especially the natural forest land degradation (NFLD), is one of the global environmental concerns that influences everyone, through food insecurity, climate change, natural disasters, and the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services such as soil and water conservation [1,2]. Data show that the global land degradation in dry lands results in land productivity losses valued around USD 13 to 28 billion per year [4]. The global community has set several sustainable goals to address this, including the United Nations strategic plan for forests (2017–2030), the Bonn. Land degradation is a major challenge in today’s China, seriously impacting those living in the affected areas [6,7,8]. In most regions of China, deforestation is one of root causes of land degradation, together with soil erosion, soil salinization and other severe natural disasters, leading to the ecosystem services decline in these areas [9]
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