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Ecological Intelligence / Subject

restoration policy and rural livelihoods

A major restoration program lifted modeled household resilience unevenly

Evidence
Peer-reviewed quasi-experimental policy evaluation
Geography
Shan-Shui ecological restoration project regions, China
System
Working lands, restoration policy and rural livelihoods

WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS

Yang and colleagues linked 76,443 household-year observations to staggered Shan-Shui project exposure. Their adjusted difference-in-differences estimate was 0.161 on a resilience index, about 2.7% of the mean, with reported robustness checks and unequal effects across household circumstances.

WHY IT MATTERS / OUR READ

Ecological restoration can produce social benefits without distributing them equally; ownership, connectivity and capacity affect who can convert new resources into durable livelihoods.

CAVEATS / UNCERTAINTY

Administrative project exposure is coarse and the resilience index embeds economic measures; this does not separately verify site-level ecological recovery or rule out all confounding.

SOURCE

Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems — Yang et al. (2026)
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China household-panel analysis found a modest association stronger among families with greater assets.

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