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Arid Land Geography ›› 2022, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (1): 287-297.doi: 10.12118/j.issn.1000–6060.2021.063

• Regional Development • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Rural revitalization path based on the resources and environment carrying capacity in arid area: A case of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region

LI Jin(),WEN Qi(),YANG Xiao   

  1. School of Geography and Planning, Ningxia University, Yinchuan 750021, Ningxia, China
  • Received:2021-02-07 Revised:2021-07-27 Online:2022-01-25 Published:2022-01-21
  • Contact: Qi WEN E-mail:lijinlj19@163.com;wenq98@163.com

Abstract:

Resources and environmental conditions are important factors that limit the socioeconomic development of arid areas. Blind development will cause irreversible damage to the environment and lead to the stagnation of regional development. Therefore, exploring the resources and environment carrying capacity of arid areas is important for planning the rural development path. Rural arid areas all over the world are defined by high rainfall variability, frequent droughts, low soil moisture, and extreme events such as flash floods, which normally combine with government shortcomings and structural inequalities to exacerbate the vulnerability of communities. Agriculture has limited livelihood options, and employment opportunities depend on activities that are sensitive to the impacts of climate change. The climatic and socioeconomic environment in rural arid areas makes communities vulnerable to food insecurity and unstable livelihoods, and leads to unsustainable agroecological systems and crop failure of the land. Ningxia is located in the transition zone of arid and semi-arid climate of China, which is the most sensitive, ecologically vulnerable zone in the global climate and is also a region with outstanding resources and environmental problems. This study aims to analyze the resources and environment carrying capacity of settlement land resources and water resources for developing rural arid land in Ningxia. This study takes counties in Ningxia as the research unit to characterize the resources and environment carrying capacity with three pairs of interaction force, namely, pressure-support, destructiveness-resilience, and degradation-promotion. Coordination degree and degree of development are used to analyze the coordinated development capacity of regional resources and environmental carrying capacity to identify the resource environment in each region and lack of carrying capacity. Results show that the overall resources and environment carrying capacity of Ningxia is weak, and the carrying capacity along the Yellow River irrigation area in the north is higher than that of the southern mountainous area. As a result of the inborn shortage of natural conditions and overgrazing, the resources in the southern mountain area are low, but the coordination degree of the degradation and uplift has improved evidently since poverty alleviation efforts have been put in place. According to the shortcomings of each county’s resources and environment in Ningxia, it is divided into four types of problem counties, namely, fragile support, fragile recovery, fragile lifting, and fragile carrying capacity. With focus on the advantages and disadvantages of the resources and environment carrying capacity of each region, Ningxia is divided into four regions: high-carrying agglomeration upgrading area, high-carrying characting protection area, medium-carrying ecological restoration area, and low-carrying ecological conservation zone. The aim is to establish appropriate rural revitalization paths based on regional industrial characteristics. In this paper, the smallest research unit is the county, starting from the resources and environment carrying capacity, and the path of rural revitalization is explored from the perspective of sustainable development with a view to providing a new thinking path and reference significance for national rural revitalization.

Key words: resources and environment carrying capacity, rural revitalization, arid area, Ningxia