The varying roles of ecosystem services in poverty alleviation among rural households in urbanizing watersheds

Understanding the relationship between ecosystem services and human well-being, especially poverty, is important for poverty alleviation and sustainable development in rural areas of urbanizing watersheds. However, there is insufficient investigation on the impact of ecosystem services on poverty alleviation at the household level in existing research. Using an urbanizing watershed with a large number of poor people, we integrated the sustainable livelihood framework with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment framework to analyze the impact of ecosystem services on poverty alleviation among different types of rural households based on surveys, cluster analysis, and multinomial logit models. The results suggested that neither provisioning services nor cultural services that are received by the households were significantly associated with poverty alleviation (P>0.1). However, the decline in regulating services had a significant, negative impact on poverty reduction (P<0.1), and the probability for natural disaster-affected farmers to fall into poverty was approximately 32 times higher than that for those who were not. Differences in household-level endowments largely explained the diverging roles of ecosystem services on poverty alleviation. Therefore, in urbanizing watersheds, policies such as agricultural insurance and targeted support should be adopted to improve the ability of poverty-stricken households to cope with disasters and prevent the rural poor from returning to poverty.