Reducing the carbon emission from agricultural production in China: do land transfer and urbanization matter?

Urbanization and land transfer have triggered a profound reform of the Chinese agricultural sector since reform and opening, leading to a continuous rise in agricultural carbon emissions. However, the impact of urbanization and land transfer on agricultural carbon emissions is not widely understood. Therefore, based on the panel data covering 30 provinces (cities) in China from 2005 to 2019, we adopted a panel autoregressive distributed lag model and a vector autoregressive model to empirically explore the causal relationship between land transfer, urbanization, and agricultural carbon emissions. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Land transfer can significantly reduce carbon emissions from agricultural production in the long run, while urbanization has a positive effect on agricultural carbon emissions. (2) In the short run, land transfer has a significant positive impact on agricultural carbon emissions, and urbanization also has a positive impact on the carbon emissions of agricultural production, but in insignificant ways. (3) There is two-way causality between land transfer and agricultural carbon emission, and between urbanization and land transfer is the same, but urbanization is the one-way Granger cause of agricultural carbon emissions. Finally, some suggestions are provided for low-carbon agriculture development: the government should encourage the transfer of land management rights and guide high-quality resources to gather in green agriculture.

Dynamic Linkages among Climate Change, Mechanization and Agricultural Carbon Emissions in Rural China.

Climate change has become a major environmental issue facing all countries, having a significant effect on all aspects of agricultural production, such as the agricultural mechanization process and fertilizer use. Greenhouse gases produced by agricultural machinery and fertilizers during agricultural production are an important cause of climate change. On the basis of the above facts, researching the connection between agricultural mechanization, climate change, and agricultural carbon emissions is crucial for the development of low-carbon agriculture and for addressing climate change. We used a variety of econometric models and methods to analyze data from China's multiple provinces (cities) covering the years 2000 through 2019, in order to meet the research objectives. Furthermore, we utilized rainfall and sunlight as variables to assess climate change and adopted Granger tests to establish the link between rainfall, sunlight, agricultural mechanization, and carbon emissions in farming. The findings indicate a bidirectional causality relationship between rainfall, sunlight, agricultural mechanization, and carbon emissions in farming. Rainfall and sunlight are Granger causes of agricultural mechanization. Furthermore, agricultural mechanization has favorable effects on carbon emissions of agriculture, and climate change has long-term implications on agricultural mechanization and carbon emissions of agriculture. Finally, this paper investigated the green path suitable for the low-carbon development of Chinese agriculture, arguing that the government should formulate low-carbon agricultural policies by region and actively promote the upgrading of agricultural machinery.