Effect of Rural Human Settlement Environment around Nature Reserves on Farmers’ Well-Being: A Field Survey Based on 1002 Farmer Households around Six Nature Reserves in China

Numerous countries actively consider the human settlement environment and have implemented rural governance strategies to ameliorate the living conditions of rural dwellers. The construction of a rural human settlement environment is an important goal of China’s rural revitalization strategy and improving farmers’ well-being is a key element of China’s policies on agriculture, farmers, and villages. However, whether a rural human settlement environment enhances farmers’ well-being remains untested. By adopting the method of random stratified sampling, this study investigated 1002 farmers inside and outside six nature reserves in Liaoning, China. OLS and ordered probit regression models were used to assess the impact on the well-being and the satisfaction of farmers with their settlement environment around nature reserves from three aspects: the natural ecological environment, the hardware facility environment, and the daily governance environment. The results of this study proved that the construction of a human settlement environment can significantly boost the well-being of farmers. Moreover, the satisfaction towards the natural ecological environment, hardware facility environment, and daily governance environment exerts a substantial impact on the well-being at the significance level of 1%, with a positive sign, showing a stable enhancement role. Among them, the satisfaction with the hardware facility environment was the most essential for improving happiness, with a coefficient of 0.126. A heterogeneity analysis suggests that the positive effect of satisfaction with the human settlement environment on farmers’ well-being within nature reserves was more significant in the natural ecological environment, with a coefficient of 0.244; the hardware facility environment had the greatest positive effect on the well-being of farmers outside nature reserves, with a coefficient of 0.224; and the daily governance environment had a greater enhancing effect on the well-being of farmers both inside and outside nature reserves. Based on these results, it is recommended that governments encourage farmers around nature reserves to participate in wildlife accident insurance, strengthen ecological environmental protection, and enhance the hardware facility environment. Furthermore, local governments should disseminate knowledge of human settlement management to farmers and improve the efficiency of human settlement environment management at the grassroots level. Finally, governments should prioritize human settlement environment development and identify the farmers’ needs of human settlement environment to enhance their well-being.