Elsevier

Ecological Indicators

Volume 64, May 2016, Pages 123-131
Ecological Indicators

Assessment of sustainable livelihoods of different farmers in hilly red soil erosion areas of southern China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2015.12.036Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We apply Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory to sustainable livelihoods.

  • Household heterogeneity was considered in assessing rural sustainable livelihoods.

  • Intergenerational sustainability may decide next generation's livelihood sustainability.

  • Intergenerational sustainability can be showed by current offspring education.

  • Agricultural specialization is also a viable pathway to attain sustainable livelihoods.

Abstract

Livelihood vulnerability in environmentally fragile areas is emerging as a key issue due to its positive feedback to environmental degradation. Assessment of sustainable livelihoods is a crucial prerequisite for targeting interventions. However, aggregated analysis usually obtained ambiguous conclusions because they ignored the heterogeneity of rural households. Here, we evaluated the livelihood sustainability of different rural households by constructing an improved Livelihood Sustainability Index (LSI) in hilly red soil erosion areas of southern China. Changting County was selected as the study case by virtue of its unique representativeness in soil erosion and poverty. The results showed that livelihood sustainability among rural households was far from equivalent. Different from previous studies, higher nonfarm income share was not always consistent with higher extent of livelihood sustainability. Besides nonfarm employment, agricultural specialization could be another viable pathway to attain sustainable livelihoods. We also found that intergenerational sustainability was one primary cause for long-term livelihood differentiation of rural households. The poor education in rural areas would aggravate livelihood vulnerability of the poor and threaten the sustainable livelihoods of specialized agricultural households. Policy implications include further investment in rural infrastructure, irrigation and drainage, and stimulus for land transfer and concentration to facilitate agrarian specialization; enhancing investment in rural education to improve intergenerational sustainability; as well as targeting of the most vulnerable households, for example, promoting development of social insurance, social relief, and medical services for orphans and widows.

Introduction

Soil erosion is a critical threat to rural sustainability and food security in many developing countries. Ecosystem services provided by natural ecosystems are most important for poor households’ livelihoods (Persha et al., 2011). However, soil erosion usually impairs rural livelihoods and aggravates poverty by decreasing ecosystem services, damaging man-made assets, or even inducing severe natural disasters. The “poverty-environment trap” has been widely accepted since poverty is attributable to environmental degradation, which in return may further deteriorate poverty in environmentally fragile areas (Cao et al., 2009, Wang et al., 2011). Given these conditions, it has been well recognized that integrating soil conservation with economic development through a series of environmental programs and development initiatives are critical for poverty alleviation and rural sustainability (Cao et al., 2009, Wang et al., 2011).

However, these activities and macroeconomic development have not evenly benefited all rural households. On the contrary, many programs have enlarged rural differentiation (Scoones et al., 2012). The income disparity among rural households has greatly increased mainly because of different participation in Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, rural-urban migration, and agricultural specialization (Wang et al., 2011, Liang et al., 2012). Especially in developing countries transition to market economy, rural livelihoods are usually heterogeneous rather than homogenous. For example, rural households are different in their livelihood assets, livelihood strategies, risk and exposure, income, living standards, and adaptive capabilities (Rahman and Akter, 2014). The overall sustainability of rural livelihoods for different households was entirely divergent. Many literatures focusing on rural sustainable livelihoods usually came to ambiguous conclusions (Singh and Hiremath, 2010), because they adopted aggregated analysis which ignored the great variability in household composition. To overcome the shortcomings of aggregated analysis, some researchers conducted disaggregated analysis to investigate livelihood vulnerability in view of geographical areas, household composition and communities (Rahman and Akter, 2010, Yan et al., 2011, Liang et al., 2012, Fang et al., 2014). However, insufficient attention was paid to the sustainable livelihoods of different household groups living in the same communities.

It is important to take into account household heterogeneity in evaluating their sustainable livelihoods (Liang et al., 2012). Due to different responses to important developing opportunities (esp. policies such as PES, decreasing constraint of labor migration, encouragement of farmland transfer and concentration), rural households have different participation in PES programs, rural–urban/international migration and agricultural specialization, which greatly promote the disparities in livelihood outcomes. Consequently, rural households generally have different livelihood sustainability.

To promote sustainable livelihood analysis, Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) was developed for practical poverty alleviation by a series of organizations, such as Department for International Development (DFID), Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) (Scoones, 2009). The framework of sustainable livelihoods encompasses five sections that finally lead to livelihood outcomes. At its core are five livelihood assets (physical, natural, human, financial, and social capital) that are deemed to underpin livelihoods at the level of the individual, household, and village (Morse and McNamara, 2013). The strength of the SLA lies in its comprehensive understanding on the forming process of sustainable livelihoods based on cause and effect analysis. Thus the framework was widely used in poverty alleviation as a set of principles guiding development interventions, a formal analytical framework to help understand what ‘is’ and what can be done, and an overall developmental objective (Farrington, 2001). However, current literature mainly focused on the poorest groups which struggled below the absolute poverty line, but ignored the livelihood sustainability of the relatively poor. Previous research concentrated in south Asia and Africa, whereas neglected China which had the largest poor population (Chen and Ravallion, 2010). Therefore, the demand to evaluate rural sustainable livelihoods of the relatively poor in China is imperative.

To assess the livelihood conditions of the poor, considerable efforts have been devoted to identify appropriate indicators for measuring sustainable livelihoods at the level of household or community (Lindenberg, 2002, Bhandari and Grant, 2007). For example, many researchers simplified the indicators of sustainable livelihoods into five or four livelihood assets to indicate livelihood sustainability (Su et al., 2009, Fang et al., 2014). Some authors put forward Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) which linked exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity to analyze the livelihood impacts of climate change on rural households (Hahn et al., 2009, Yan et al., 2011). Other indices were also proposed to calculate sustainable livelihoods, such as Sustainable Livelihood Security Index (SLSI) and Household Livelihood Security (HLS) (Chambers and Conway, 1992, Bhandari and Grant, 2007, Singh and Hiremath, 2010). Generally, these indices were put forward to deal with basic needs of the poor, especially to solve starvation and food scarcity (Vincent, 2007). However the livelihoods of the relatively poor were often disregarded. According to Maslow's hierarchy of need theory, human's needs could be classified in order of prepotency as physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization, which form a need pyramid from basic physiological needs to upper self-actualization (Maslow, 1943). By virtue of the Maslow's theory, the most preponderant needs would be satisfied first. For the households in relative poverty, whose subsistence problems (esp. food and clothing) were already satisfied, higher-order needs, such as a high quality education for offspring, could be pivotal for intergenerational sustainability. Better offspring education contributed to sustainable livelihoods of younger generations by promoting productivity and efficiency no matter in agriculture or off-farm sectors (Yunez-Naude and Taylor, 2001, De Brauw and Rozellem, 2008, Asadullah and Rahman, 2009, Reimers and Klasen, 2013).

Our primary objective in this study is to evaluate rural households’ sustainable livelihoods by comparing several farmer subgroups in China, with a particular emphasis on the intergenerational sustainability for the relatively poor. Household classification is mainly based on primary livelihood strategies and household incomes. Results could elucidate the differences of household sustainable livelihoods and point out the weak components of each group. The results also have important policy implications for poverty eradiation in China and other developing countries.

Section snippets

Study area

Changting County is located in the western Fujian Province of southeastern China (Fig. 1). It is characterized by a humid, subtropical monsoon climate and is primarily covered by loose granite red soils (Wang et al., 2011). Historically, it was covered by extensive vegetation and had slight soil erosion. However, a half-century of human destruction and fragile natural conditions jointly led to severe soil erosion (Wang et al., 2011, Wang et al., 2012a). With higher soil erosion intensity and

Natural assets

The result of land distribution shows that five categories have different natural assets (Table 3). SAHs have more land (including cropland and forestland) than other subgroups. However, PFHs have less land because of smaller family size due to aging period of life cycle. For MFH1, MFH2 and NHs, their land area gradually decreased in sequence (Table 3). Due to equal distribution of cropland in late 1980s in Changting County, the current disparity in cropland area of different households was

Discussion

Livelihood sustainability perspectives provide an important lens for complex rural sustainable development from the micro farmer perspective (Lindenberg, 2002). Moreover, the rising intra-rural inequalities in livelihood sustainability will be a prominent feature of China. However, the connotation and criteria of sustainable livelihoods is tremendously divergent based on different social-economic conditions and spatial-temporal scales. We referred to Maslow's hierarchy of needs in assessment to

Conclusions

Accurate assessment of livelihood sustainability in some special areas (such as environmentally fragile areas, poverty-stricken areas and disaster-stricken areas) is crucial for understanding the problems of sustainability and implementing poverty alleviation programs. One of the major challenges in measuring livelihood sustainability is to establish a feasible assessment indicator system. After linking Maslow's hierarchy of needs with sustainable livelihoods, the livelihood sustainability of

Acknowledgments

The study was jointly funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 41371527) and Fujian Provincial Social Science Planning Foundation (Grant no. 2012C015). We thank local governments of Changting County for providing valuable data and help in our field work. We also gratefully acknowledge the help from two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on a previous version of the manuscript.

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