Abstract
As an arid and semiarid region in that is frequently hit by drought, Northwest China is ecologically vulnerable. Faced with drought and other extreme events, policy makers have given top priority to the formulation and implementation of adaptation policies. This paper investigates the roles of community assets, including community social capital and access to public services, in mitigating the impact of drought in Northwest China. Based on a micro-level dataset of individual households and villages from two provinces, we find a major effect of community assets on grain yields, after controlling for other influences. Our econometric analyses show that the severity of drought in the study areas significantly reduces grain yields. The negative impact of drought, however, can be significantly mitigated in villages with better community assets. Several policies, including enhancing investments in communities’ infrastructure and providing public services related to drought, are recommended to both improve local adaptive capacity to drought and reduce poverty in the drought-prone areas.
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Notes
During our sampling, there were the following two cases: (1) the counties that had experienced one severe disaster year and two normal years, and (2) the counties that had experienced two disaster years and one normal year during the past 3 years (2010–2012). In both cases, the rule is to select the most recent normal and disaster year for survey so that the difficulty of farmers’ recall can be reduced.
The statistics over the years come from the China Agriculture Yearbooks (from 1980 to 2000).
According to Boyle et al. (2014), the water infrastructure investment sources in China can be sorted into two types: upper-level governments including provincial, county, and township Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation Districts, and local-level investments from village leaders, water user associations, contractors, and farmers. The investment in canal and dam system is generally led by the upper-level governments for their heavy investment costs; most of these investments are posed by upper-level governments’ mandates based on the development plan such as the Five-Year Plan. While villages and/or farmers also invest in lower level of irrigation system (e.g., tubewell, pond), they are more responsive for the maintenance of these projects within the village (Wang et al. 2014b). Hence, our assumption that the community assets such as canal and dam are independent on the village characteristics might not be a serious problem for the specification.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the financial support of National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (71503276, 71431006), Ministry of Education (16JZD013), and Natural Sciences Foundation of Hunan in China (2016JJ3156) for this research.
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Li, Y., Wang, Y. & Chen, X. The roles of community assets in mitigating the impact of drought on grain yields in Northwest China. Nat Hazards 89, 801–815 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-017-2994-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-017-2994-0