Building a sustainable development model for China's poverty-stricken reservoir regions based on system dynamics

Poverty eradication and sustainable development are common missions of humanity and are top priorities of the Chinese government. Nevertheless, the poverty of reservoir immigrants is usually interwoven with eco-environmental and geo-disaster factors, making poverty alleviation the most challenging task in rural China. In this context, a System Dynamics Model (SDM) is used to explore interactive mechanisms of eco-environment, geo-disasters and immigrant poverty as well as enable policy makers to understand the impacts of different investment strategies on the key variables and the sustainable development of China's Poverty-stricken Reservoir Regions (CPRR). Based on data from 1998 to 2014, this paper simulates the Wanzhou reservoir area. It designs four policy scenarios to simulate changes to the major variables: sewage treatment investment, disaster control investment, soil erosion control investment and poverty alleviation fund, from 2015 to 2020. It is found that 1) China's Poverty-stricken Reservoir Regions are highly likely to achieve the poverty reduction goal by 2020 by taking the coordinated strategy and pay more attention to disaster management; and 2) the coordinated development scenario could reduce poverty, sewage discharge, disease incidence, geo-disasters and soil erosion, and increase the areas of forest cover and agricultural land systematically. The SDM method is reliable for the dynamic development analysis of CPRR. The results could offer policy recommendations to policy makers and provide a method to implement best practices for the sustainable development of CPRR.