1191 | 941 | Land degradation and poverty has been decoupled in rural China since the new millennium | Wenkai Bao, Yuanyuan Yang

Land degradation and poverty are intrinsically linked in a complex way and usually can fall into an unsustainable poverty situation. A key question is whether this unsustainable trap can be broken and what kind of effective solutions can be used. Combining time-series remotely sensed data to map degraded land and statistical data to represent povert, we attempt to answer how land degradation and rural poverty are related, evolve, and what are their interacting mechanisms. Our analysis reveals that the correlation between arable land degradation and rural poverty changes from significant negative correlation during 1985-2000 to non-significant correlation during 2000-2018, which indicates a decoupling effect facilitated by external factors such as national efforts on land restoration, industrial transformation, and enhanced poverty alleviation policies after 2000, etc. This study provide evidence for the effectiveness of targeted policy-making to realize worldwide sustainable poverty reduction and land management.

Wenkai Bao, Yuanyuan Yang
Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGSNRR, CAS)

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ID Abstract: 941