Balancing Rural Household Livelihood and Regional Ecological Footprint in Water Source Areas of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project

Abstract

Abstract:There is a knowledge gap and practical demand to understand the co-evolutionary relationship between rural household livelihood and regional ecological footprints for developing sustainable livelihoods in ecological conservation regions. This paper tracks the change trajectories of rural household livelihoods and regional ecological footprints in four water source areas of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project where various ecological and environmental protection projects and measures are being proposed to protect water quality. As a result, some concerns regarding rural livelihood have arisen. The sustainable livelihood approach developed by DFID (Department for International Development in UK) was used to measure the natural, physical, financial, human, and social capitals of rural livelihoods, while the ecological footprint accounting approach was used to calculate the amount of bio-productive spaces that produce the yearly resource flows for human consumption. The study period is 2000-2014 and data was obtained from the Statistical Yearbooks. The results show that the change trend of natural capitals of rural households, which have increased by 72.5% (SY), 98.8% (NY), 69.3% (TA), and 120.3% (JN) within 15 years, determine the overall change track of rural livelihoods and that rural household livelihood grows with the expansion of regional ecological footprints. Sensitivity of regional eco-footprints to rural livelihood varies from 5.8 to 0.5 in case areas. It is recommended that in the "post South-to-North Water Diversion era", four policy instruments-population transfer and relocation, industrial restructuring and updating, rural infrastructure and community reconstruction, and cross-ecological compensation-should be adopted to improve sustainable livelihoods in these four water source areas.

Sustainability Evaluation Based on a Three-Dimensional Ecological Footprint Model: A Case Study in Hunan, China

“…Taking the South-North Water Transfer Middle Route Project as an example, Wei and Xia [33] calculated the losses of ecological immigrants and provided a more reasonable compensation amount based on the ecological footprint theory. Wang, et al [34] tracked the change trajectories of rural household livelihoods and regional ecological footprints in four water source areas (Shiyan, Nanyang, Tai'an, and Jining) of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project in 2000-2014. Wang, et al [35] assessed the positive and negative impacts of cascaded diversion small hydropower (SHP) on environment.…”

Development of a Mobile Application System for Eco-Accounting

“…Eco-accounting is used for the generation, analysis and use of financial and related non-financial information in order to effectively solve the problems encountered in the process of sustainable development [1,2]. As a tool to report sustainable impacts, it has been applied in ecological footprint measurements, e.g., water footprint [3][4][5] and carbon footprint [6,7], soil quality assessment [8], ecosystems [9] and energy efficiency [10]. Studies have revealed that eco-accounting is able to calculate environmental impacts from various aspects, however, incorporating lifecycle impact assessment methods into the eco-accounting framework would provide an extended eco-accounting solution from the perspective of products' life cycle.…”

“…With this solution, the accounting will be able to cover major environmental impact categories through the product's business supply chain and to share the eco-accounting results among stakeholders, which would be one step further to support sustainable development in the circular economy context. Many scholars have applied the conventional eco-accounting merits for major stakeholders of supply chains in various scenarios such as eco-innovation for businesses [11][12][13], and decision making for policy implications [4,6]. However, few studies have accommodated the eco-accounting results for consumers and other stakeholders of the product supply chain.…”