Land use change and its socio-economic driving forces under stress of project in old reservoir area

Abstract

The old reservoir areas built in 1950s-1970s left behind many socio-economic problems, because of the administrative backward migration and little migration fund, and all these problems would be tied to land. Based on interviewing with peasant households, combining land use survey and socio-economic statistical index, this paper analyzed land use change and its corresponding driving forces in Linshui reservoir area of Dahonghe Reservoir. Results showed that land use change in the reservoir area was mainly embodied on low-lying land submergence and migration requisition land. The former changed the land use patterns, and the latter mainly reconstructed original land property and made land over-fi'agmented. Cultivated land per capita was 0.041ha in this area, below the cordon of cultivated land per capita enacted by FAO. Currently, there were still 30.25% of peasant households being short of grain in trimester of one year, and there were 35.27% of people living under the poverty line. The conditions of eco-environment in Linshui Reservoir Area were worse, and healthy and sub-healthy eco-environment accounted for less proportion, composed of green belt around the reservoir area and paddy field ecosystem, and economic forest and orchard ecosystem, respectively. The stress of the reservoir project was macroscopic background to analyze the driving factors of land use change, and real underlying diving factor of the land use change in the area was the change of cultural landscape under the stress of reservoir project. The rapid increase of population was the key factor to induce the change of man-land relationship in the reservoir area, the low level of rural economy was the crucial factor to decide how migrants input for production, and the belief of migrants, influencing the land use patterns in a certain extent, was the inducing factor to keep land use stable. The low-lying submergence and infi'astructure construction accompanied the reservoir project were leading factors driving land use change in the area, while changes in land use patterns, after the reservoir being built, were the responses of peasant households' behaviors to land use change. KEY WORDS: land use change; socio-economic driving factor; project stress; old reservoir area CLC number: F301.24 Document code: A

The relationships between land use change and demographic dynamics in western Jilin province

“…woodland, wetland and unused land, etc) to convert to agricultural land and built-up land (Lau et al, 2005). And human lifestyle changes were bound to induce the adjustment of internal structure of agricultural land (Shao et al, 2007). Population growth needs to reclaim more grassland and wetland as farmland and built-up land, while some other problems caused by change in the relationship between human generated would also act on the land, for example, the excessive application of fertilizers and pesticides with the aim of increasing crop yield certainly would produce great harms on water resource and the health of human and animal.…”