Research On Livelihoods Changes Of Ecological Resettlement Households In World Heritage: A Case Of Wulingyuan

With the rapid development of heritage tourism, the commercialized phenomenon of many domestic world heritage sites is growing serious, "tragedy of commons" is widespread. To maximize the retention of the authenticity of World Heritage, protect the natural environment of ecologically fragile areas, and help local farmers out of poverty, the Chinese government implemented an important initiative of ecological migration project.Local residents, as the main provider of ecosystem services and participants of the ecological migration project, the sustainability of whose livelihoods is affected by the implementation of ecological migration. Moreover, the strength of the ability of immigrant households’ livelihood and alternative livelihoods affects the use of natural resource in heritage sites and environmental protection, and it is also related to the effectiveness and sustainability of the ecological migration project.Under the guidance of sustainable development, benefit compensation and community involvement theory, with taking the ecological migration project implemented in the resettlement area of Wulingyuan as an example, this paper construct a sustainable livelihoods index system of ecological relocation households in World Heritage by bringing in the advanced international framework, sustainable livelihoods, combining with the actual situation of studied area and using participatory observation methods getting firsthand data. Meanwhile, this paper analyses the change of different immigrant households’ livelihood which depend on tourism through the contrast of immigrant households and non-immigrant households’ livelihood capital and dependence on tourism. Finally, a logistic model is built to investigate how different livelihood capital factors affect the households’ livelihood means dependent on tourism. The conclusions are as following:(1) Among the livelihood capital of residents in Wulingyuan, the stock of natural capital is the most, followed by human capital, financial capital the lowest.(2) After the implementation of ecological migration project, the stock level of livelihood capital of ecological migration household has improved. The mean of human capital of immigrant and non-immigrant households are 0.601 and 0.577, physical capital are 0.488 and 0.442, financial capital are 0.258 and 0.231, social capital are 0.469 and 0.393, respectively.(3) The income sources of ecological migration households become more simple, and more arelikely to choose livelihood lower dependence on tourism compared to the previous.(4) To reduce the degree of households’ livelihood dependent on tourism who moved out the Wulingyuan Scenic in the ecological migration project, and make the livelihood transited effectively, measures that could take are: raising up the education levels, improving the housing situation, helping to add fixed capital and get credit loan, expanding social relationship network and so on.Findings of this paper would be helpful to solve the practical difficulties Wulingyuan immigrant households faced and to promote the construction of tourism projects acting smoothly. What’s more, it provides theoretical guidance for solving livelihood problems of landless farmers in tourism heritage sites in practice.