Spatial covariance of ecosystem services and poverty in China

Abstract

Ecosystem services (ESs) are known to be particularly important to the rural poor globally and effective management of such services is argued to be a sustainable pathway out of poverty. However, there is as yet no clear evidence as to how important ESs are for poverty alleviation, partly as there are very few large-scale studies addressing this issue. Here, we examine patterns of spatial covariation of income poverty and provisioning services and biodiversity using county-level data across China (n = 1924). We conduct our analyses both at the national scale and at the subnational scale. At the national scale, poor counties have significantly lower levels of agricultural provisioning services and water availability, but significantly higher levels of forest-related provisioning services and biodiversity. This finding supports the hypothesis that in general, high levels of poverty co-occur with areas with high levels of non-agricultural ESs. However, in the forest-dominated counties in southern China, low poverty, high densities of forest-related provisioning services and high levels of natural forest cover co-occur. Our results highlight the scale and context dependency of patterns of cooccurrence of poverty and ESs, and the importance of large-scale analyses for understanding the relationships between poverty and ESs.ARTICLE HISTORY

Understanding the Importance of Provisioning Ecosystem Services in Natural Resource-Dependent Poor Household: A Case Study of Jerlun, Kedah

“…Provisioning ecosystem services and their benefits are essential to support the poor's lives, especially in obtaining food and subsistence (Eigenbrod et al, 2017;Pritchard et al, 2019). Haines-young and Potschin ( 2013) have divided into four recognised main sections, namely nutrition, including all ecosystem outputs used directly or indirectly as foodstuffs (including potable water); inclusive water supply for human and other consumption; materials (biotics) used in the manufacture of goods; and biotics for renewable energy sources.…”

“…For instance, rural sub-Saharan African people depend on providing ecosystem services to sustain their livelihoods (Jew et al, 2019). It is also related to population expansion, which shows a significant rise in the need for ecosystem services and benefits, particularly for provisioning services, among the poor population (Eigenbrod et al, 2017;Haines-young and Potschin, 2013;Norshahida and Aziz, 2018;Pritchard et al, 2019).…”