Land-use Behavior of Farming Households and Rural Land Degradation in a Karst Area of China
Rural land degradation restricts human survival and sustainable agricultural development. The land-use behavior of farming households and their methods of resource utilization affect land quality and environment. This paper analyzed the land-use behavior
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Land-use Behavior of Farming Households and Rural Land Degradation in a Karst Area of China Yan Liu and Zhu Qian
Introduction The impacts of human activities on environment and resources have become increasingly evident, causing severe damages to natural ecosystems and land degradation (Yang et al. 2015). Inappropriate land-use behavior of farming households (e.g., deforestation, steep slope land reclamation, overgrazing, and mining) is one of the main factors that negatively influences the eco-environment (Vu et al. 2014; Xiong et al. 2017), especially in developing countries and regions (Hammad and Tumeizi 2012; Liang et al. 2016). Karst areas represent some of the poorest regions in the world and are characterized by increasing poverty and land degradation. Poverty leads to land degradation, and land degradation, in turn, aggravates poverty (Huang et al. 2008). This pattern is very clear in the eco-environmentally fragile karst area in Southwest China (Xiong et al. 2017, Zhang et al. 2016). Farming households typically have a single livelihood mode in this area, and they face issues such as poverty, large population, backward economy, and severe land degradation. Therefore, analyzing the impact of rural livelihoods on land
Y. Liu School of Geography and Environmental Science, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, Guizhou, China Z. Qian (*) School of Planning, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 J. Gao et al. (eds.), Social Welfare in India and China, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5648-7_5
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degradation can provide basis and reference for the restoration and reconstruction of ecosystem in karst area, and also for land structure and farming household behavior optimization. Analyzing the interrelationships between livelihood of farming households, land-use behavior, and land degradation is crucial for achieving the sustainability of land and agri-ecosystems (Rammel et al. 2007; Liang et al. 2016). It is about the dynamics between the socio-economic system and the eco-environmental system (Holden et al. 2004; Vu et al. 2014), in which farming household’s livelihood and their land-use behavior fall into the socio-economic category, and rural land degradation falls into the eco-environmental category (Hammad and Tumeizi 2012). The farming household is the center in the relationships and its goal is to survive. These factors interact with each other and evolve as a dynamic system. In this system, farming household’s land-use behavior (e.g., farmland transfers, agricultural production, cultivated land slopes, etc.) directly decides their livelihood activity and geographical range, and then the different livelihood modes are formed. The pressure to convert farmland to forest or cultivated land is also different in different farming household’s livelihood modes (Zhang et al. 2016). Farming household’s behavior and livelihood strategy are affected by livelihood capitals—human, social, natural, physical, and financial capitals
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