Food-security compensatory capacity under ecological conversion regulations: evidence from basin segments and rural households in the Yellow River basin

Le résumé fourni par la source

Ecological conversion of farmland is an important policy tool for balancing ecological restoration and food security. To avoid overlap between the dependent index and household livelihood variables, this study reconstructs a Food-Security Compensatory Capacity Index (SCI-R) consisting of economic compensation and ecological substitution, while treating livelihood capital and livelihood strategies as external household characteristics. The study combines repeated macro county-level records for 2010, 2015, and 2020 with a 2023 survey of 300 households nested within 16 sampled counties in the Yellow River Basin. The AHP-entropy procedure is used to construct SCI-R. Descriptive comparisons, ANOVA, exploratory county-level analysis, and regressions with village-clustered standard errors are used to examine differences across basin segments and associations with household livelihood capital. Under the baseline AHP-entropy weights, household-level SCI-R was higher in the upstream section (4.4 ± 1.1) than in the midstream (3.9 ± 1.0) and downstream sections (4.0 ± 0.9), while the latter two sections did not differ significantly. A descriptive dimension-weight sensitivity check showed that the exact basin ranking changes under alternative weighting schemes, although the contrast between upstream ecological-substitution strength and downstream economic-compensation strength remains stable. Section-specific county-level correlations between urban-network centrality and SCI-R were positive but statistically inconclusive because only five or six sampled counties were available in each section. In the full household model, urban-network centrality was positively associated with SCI-R. Financial, human, social, and physical capital were positively associated with SCI-R, whereas natural capital was negatively associated with it. Specialized tourism households had a higher SCI-R than mixed-tourism and non-tourism households. These findings describe statistical associations within the Yellow River Basin case and should not be interpreted as evidence of causal or universally applicable spatial mechanisms.

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