Identification and assessment of the poverty-returning risks facing households in rural tourism sites: A case study of Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hubei Province

After the comprehensive victory in the battle against poverty, it is crucial to prevent people from large scale returning to poverty for consolidating and expanding the achievements of poverty alleviation and turning to rural revitalization. Taking 18 rural tourism sites in Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture of Hubei Province (hereinafter referred to as Enshi) as the research areas, this study identified various potential poverty-returning risks (PRR) that households are facing, and built a set of indicators to evaluate the PRR. Collecting data from questionnaires distributed to the households, this paper discussed the synthesized PRR and its dimensions facing the surveyed households by using a weighted sum index method, and analyzed the differences of households with different types of livelihood strategies in the synthesized PRR and its dimensions by using ANOVA. Results show that households in the rural tourism sites of Enshi are facing five types of potential PRR: natural risks, consumption risks, education risks, income risks and health risks. The synthesized PRR of the surveyed households as a whole is low (16.737), while income risks are relatively high (4.682), followed by education and natural risks, and consumption and health risks are lower (2.614, 2.230). Different types of households are facing significantly different PRR, with tourism-involved households facing higher PRR than those households which are not involved in tourism, and agriculture-oriented households facing higher natural risks and subsidy-dependent households facing higher health risk. To consolidate the achievements of poverty-alleviation and to reduce the PRR in the period of "post poverty alleviation", this paper proposes the following suggestions: setting up special fund to help households according to their real needs, improving skill training system to enhance households' off-farm employment ability, and promoting rural civilization construction to raise the awareness of rational consumption.