Estimating Livelihood Vulnerability and Its Impact on Adaptation Strategies in the Context of Disaster Avoidance Resettlement in Southern Shaanxi, China

Wei Liu (), Jing Gao, Jie Xu and Cong Li
Additional contact information
Wei Liu: School of Public Administration, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an 710055, China
Jing Gao: School of Public Administration, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an 710055, China
Jie Xu: School of Public Administration, Xi’an University of Finance and Economics, Xi’an 710100, China
Cong Li: School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 8, 1-15

Abstract: In order to alleviate ecological environmental degradation and to enhance sustainable rural household livelihoods, the Shaanxi government of China launched a disaster mitigation program: the disaster avoidance resettlement. Measuring household livelihood vulnerability and further assessing its influence, hold the key to strengthening livelihood adaptation in the context of disaster resettlement. Taking Ankang—in southern Shaanxi Province, China—as an example, this article explores the impact mechanism of household livelihood vulnerability on adaptation strategies through a multinominal logistic regression model in which 657 rural questionnaires were employed. In order to provide more integrated empirical evidence, we draw lessons from the livelihood of the previously proposed vulnerability framework, which has three dimensions: the degree of sensitivity, exposure, and adaptive capacity. The adaptive strategies were divided into pure farming, non-agricultural, and diversified adaptation types according to the types of income sources. The results indicated that livelihood vulnerability varies with different resettlement characteristics. In terms of adaptive strategy types, the vulnerability of pure farming households was the largest. This article found that the relocated households who had a lower sensitivity preferred the non-farming livelihood adaptation strategy. Local households with a high adaptive ability preferred to implement diversified adaptation strategies. The weaker the social support network of the relocated households, the more likely they were to choose off-farm adaptation strategies. Our research results are robust and have broader implications in terms of promoting rural household diversifications of adaptation strategies and reducing livelihood vulnerability.

Keywords: disaster resettlement; livelihood vulnerability; adaptive strategies; rural household (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/13/8/1497/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/13/8/1497/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:13:y:2023:i:8:p:1497-:d:1204072

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().