Eliminating poverty is the primary goal of sustainable development. China has eliminated absolute poverty in 2020, yet there is a chance that it could happen again. The poor population is mostly concentrated in ecologically fragile areas. We need to take more inclusive and effective initiatives to prevent the population in ecologically fragile areas from returning to poverty. In this study, a decision tree and logistic regression model were used to assess the risk of returning to poverty in Karst ecologically fragile areas. The data comes from 303 households in four counties in Guizhou and Guangxi. There are 12 main influencing factors identified, with the percentage of workforce numbers and loans having interactive effects. The results show that: (1) Poor resilience of livelihood assets, external shocks, and the effects of some support measures will be visible after a long period, leading to "transient" poverty and return to poverty. (2) Ecological environment management in ecologically fragile areas is very important to solve the problem of returning to poverty. (3) Appropriate loans can reduce poverty, especially when loans are used to cultivate a new excellent labor force. At the same time, it is necessary to evaluate farmers’ repayment ability reasonably and scientifically to reduce the risk of returning to poverty. The combination of ecological restoration and agricultural development is the key to solving ecological and social problems in Karst areas. Efforts should be made to improve the risk-resilience of farmers’ livelihood assets and the efficiency of livelihood assets utilization by implementing targeted support measures. This research provides a new approach to studying the mechanism of poverty recurrence, which is of great practical significance for consolidating the results of poverty eradication and realizing rural vitalization.

China has put forward a series of forestry-based poverty alleviation policies, aiming to alleviate poverty and improve the livelihoods of rural households, especially in backward and ecologically fragile areas with rich forest resources. Based on field survey data, we used an empirical analysis method to investigate the role of forestry-based policies in alleviating the relative poverty of rural households in the rocky desertification area in southwest China. The Logit regression results demonstrate that forestry-based poverty alleviation policies are significant at alleviating the relative poverty of rural households, and there are differences in the degree and significance of the impact of various forestry-based poverty alleviation policies. In particular, the forestry industry support (FIS) policy, the ecological forest rangers (EFRs) policy, and the Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) can significantly decrease the incidence of relative poverty of rural households, while the effect of the Public Benefit Forest Compensation Program (PBFC) on decreasing the incidence of relative poverty is not significant. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the role and effectiveness of China’s forestry-based poverty alleviation policies, and can provide a reference for optimizing the forestry poverty alleviation policies for the specific area and even the whole nation, as well as provide experience for worldwide poverty alleviation by forestry.

The Sloping Land Conversion Program (SLCP) is a significant measure to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations in 2015. SLCP plays an important role in poverty alleviation and income increase for farmers in poor areas. The purpose of this study is to analyze whether the income of farmers has increased after participating in SLCP, and whether SLCP has released the agricultural labor force to obtain non-agricultural income by participating in non-agricultural work. Based on the field investigation in Luocheng County and Longsheng County of Guangxi, Libo County, and Dushan county of Guizhou, this paper uses the method of propensity score matching (PSM) to explore the impact of SLCP on the income of farmers in rocky desertification areas. According to our research, it is found that: (1) SLCP has a positive effect of 5.2% on the average annual net income of farmers, a positive effect of 43.2% on agricultural income, and a negative effect of 9.8% on non-agricultural income, but all of the effects are insignificant. Selective deviation will overestimate the impact of SLCP on farmers’ total income and agricultural income and underestimate the impact on non-agricultural income. SLCP failed to promote the transformation of farmers into secondary and tertiary industries. The mechanism of SLCP to increase farmers’ income is complex. (2) Farmers’ participation in SLCP is influenced by work experience and education level in human capital, participation in skills training in social capital, and owning durable consumer goods in physical capital. Although SLCP will promote economic development under the condition of improving the ecological environment in the future, it is not advisable to exchange farmers’ livelihood for ecological construction at present. The implementation of SLCP should consider not only the overall ecological benefits, but also the short-term social and economic benefits.