Increase or decrease? Impact of straw return on farmers' agricultural income in Jianghan Plain, Central China.

In the context of emphasizing on the food production, clean air guarding and sustainable development of agriculture, straw returning practices have been widely promoted, however, most studies have not linked straw returning adoption and smallholder's agricultural income in double-season rice cropping system. Based on a face-to-face survey data from 797 farmers in Jianghan Plain, Central China, we filled this gap by using the endogenous switching regression model to estimate the impact of farmer's straw returning on their agricultural income. The evidences show number of family laborers and technical training are the main factors influencing farmers' adoption of SR.

Intranational synergies and trade-offs reveal common and differentiated priorities of sustainable development goals in China.

Accelerating efforts for the Sustainable Development Goals requires understanding their synergies and trade-offs at the national and sub-national levels, which will help identify the key hurdles and opportunities to prioritize them in an indivisible manner for a country. Here, we present the importance of the 17 goals through synergy and trade-off networks. Our results reveal that 19 provinces show the highest trade-offs in SDG13 (Combating Climate Change) or SDG5 (Gender Equality) consistent with the national level, with other 12 provinces varying.

The spatial and source heterogeneity of agricultural emissions highlight necessity of tailored regional mitigation strategies.

Agriculture contributes considerable greenhouse gas emissions while feed the constantly expanding world population. The challenge of balancing food security with emissions reduction to create a mutually beneficial situation is paramount. However, assessing targeted mitigation potential for agricultural emissions remains challenging, lacking comprehensive sub-national evaluations.

Tele-connecting local consumption to cultivated land use and hidden drivers in China.

China faces significant pressure on cultivated land resources due to the accelerated pace of urbanization in recent years. The study of embodied cultivated land offers a new perspective on alleviating pressure on cultivated land between different regions. However, the temporal dynamics characteristic and the intersectoral linkages of embodied cultivated land have rarely been systematically described.

Examination of the relationship between agricultural carbon emission efficiency and food quality and safety: from the perspective of environmental regulation.

An important breakthrough in the coordinated development of China's low-carbon goals and food security strategies is agricultural development oriented toward quality, safety, green, and low carbon. This study integrated command-control and market-incentive environmental regulation (ER), agricultural eco-efficiency (ACEE), and food quality and safety (FQS) into a unified theoretical framework. The unexpected output-oriented Super-SBM model was used to calculate the ACEE of China's provinces and cities from 2011 to 2020 and test the bidirectional causality between ACEE and FQS through the system generalized moment estimation model.

Livestock greenhouse gas emission and mitigation potential in China.

Livestock is an important source of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) in China. Understanding the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission trends and reduction strategies in livestock is crucial for promoting low-carbon transformation of the livestock sector (LS) and achieving the goal of "carbon peak and carbon neutralization". First, based on the life cycle assessment and IPCC coefficient methods, we calculated the GHGE of the LS in 31 provinces of China from 2000 to 2020 and identified the temporal and spatial evolution of GHG emission intensity.

Unevenly distributed CO and its impacts on terrestrial carbon uptake under the changing land uses.

Changes in land-use structure and pattern can affect both atmospheric CO concentrations and the terrestrial carbon budget. To explore the effects of non-uniformly distributed CO concentration on terrestrial carbon uptake under land-use changes, this study integrated global CO concentrations, Net Primary Productivity (NPP), and land-use data under historical period and SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.

Changes in China's food security driven by nutrition security and resource constraints.

Food security and the utilization of natural resources in a sustainable manner are vital to the expansion of China's agricultural system. The relationship between environmental pressure and dietary structure has influenced the quantity and spatial distribution of China's food supply and demand, but it has not been evaluated. Our research centered on the security of China's food nutrition-resources-food (NRF) system, considering the inherent relationship between food security, nutritional health, and resource security.

Global monthly gridded atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations under the historical and future scenarios.

Increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO) concentrations is the main driver of global warming due to fossil fuel combustion. Satellite observations provide continuous global CO retrieval products, that reveal the nonuniform distributions of atmospheric CO concentrations. However, climate simulation studies are almost based on a globally uniform mean or latitudinally resolved CO concentrations assumption.

Examining the impacts of future land use/land cover changes on climate in Punjab province, Pakistan: implications for environmental sustainability and economic growth.

Land use and land cover changes (LULCC) significantly affect the climate at regional and global levels through different biogeophysical and biogeochemical processes. However, the effects of biogeophysical aspects of LULCC on climate have been often ignored, which may overestimate the biogeochemical effects on climate change. Thus, understanding the biogeophysical influence of land use changes on climate change in future potential scenarios is crucial.

Assessment of the impact of climate change on cities livability in China.

As global warming worsens, climatic conditions in many regions are undergoing profound change, which could influence certain industries, such as agriculture and transportation, and affect the livability of cities. In this study, cities statistics and meteorological station data of the past decade in China were used to analyze the effect of climate change on cities livability. The livability of 288 Chinese cities during 2006-2016 was assessed using an analytic hierarchy process method.

Measuring inclusive wealth of China: Advances in sustainable use of resources.

The inclusive wealth approach is increasingly common to measure the sustainable development of the countries. It comprised the natural, human and produced capital of nations to measure social wellbeing. We measure the inclusive wealth of the provinces in China from 2000 to 2015 and reports the sustainable use of the resources.

Investigation of a spatial coupling relationship between carbon emission performance and regional urbanization in China.

In light of the problem of environmental pollution caused by fossil fuel combustion, and its association with rapid urbanization, China is grappling with the question of how to reduce carbon emissions through more efficient energy consumption while simultaneously advancing its economic development. We applied a directional distance function to estimate the carbon emission performance of 30 provinces in China during the period 2000-2016. We selected an index system to assess urbanization processes in these provinces and conducted a spatial analysis to investigate the relationship between urbanization and carbon emission performance.

Multidecadal, county-level analysis of the effects of land use, Bt cotton, and weather on cotton pests in China.

Long-term changes in land use, climate, and agricultural technologies may affect pest severity and management. The influences of these major drivers can only be identified by analyzing long-term data. This study examines panel data on land use, adoption of genetically modified (Bt) insect-resistant cotton, weather, pest severity, and insecticide use on three major cotton pests for 51 counties in China during 1991-2015.

China's response to a national land-system sustainability emergency.

China has responded to a national land-system sustainability emergency via an integrated portfolio of large-scale programmes. Here we review 16 sustainability programmes, which invested US$378.5 billion (in 2015 US$), covered 623.

City-level climate change mitigation in China.

As national efforts to reduce CO emissions intensify, policy-makers need increasingly specific, subnational information about the sources of CO and the potential reductions and economic implications of different possible policies. This is particularly true in China, a large and economically diverse country that has rapidly industrialized and urbanized and that has pledged under the Paris Agreement that its emissions will peak by 2030. We present new, city-level estimates of CO emissions for 182 Chinese cities, decomposed into 17 different fossil fuels, 46 socioeconomic sectors, and 7 industrial processes.

Grassland ecosystem responses to climate change and human activities within the Three-River Headwaters region of China.

The Three-River Headwaters region (TRHR) of China is an important part of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. Although the TRHR is rich in grassland resources, the ecosystem of this area is extremely fragile. Natural and artificial interference have been key to the development of grassland ecosystem spatiotemporal heterogeneity, although the intensity and mode of their influence on ecological processes varies depending on scale; analyses in this area are therefore also scale-dependent.

Assessing changes in the value of ecosystem services in response to land-use/land-cover dynamics in Nigeria.

Increasing human activities worldwide have significantly altered the natural ecosystems and consequently, the services they provide. This is no exception in Nigeria, where land-use/land-cover has undergone a series of dramatic changes over the years mainly due to the ever-growing large population. However, estimating the impact of such changes on a wide range of ecosystem services is seldom attempted.

Land-use/land-cover change and ecosystem service provision in China.

As a result of economics and policy, land-use/land-cover change (LUCC) in China has undergone a series of complicated changes over the past three decades. However, the effects of LUCCs on ecosystem service values (ESVs) have never been previously assessed at the national scale. Thus, on the basis of three Chinese LUCC maps from 1988, 2000, and 2008, we examined changes in land-use/land-cover and consequent ESVs using a value transfer method.

[Prediction and simulation of urban area expansion in Pearl River Delta Region under the RCPs climate scenarios].

The sizes and number of cities in China are increasing rapidly and complicated changes of urban land use system have occurred as the social economy develops rapidly. This study took the urban agglomeration of Pearl River Delta Region as the study area to explore the driving mechanism of dynamic changes of urban area in the urbanization process under the joint influence of natural environment and social economic conditions. Then the CA (cellular automata) model was used to predict and simulate the urban area changes until 2030 under the designed scenarios of planning and RCPs (representative concentration pathways).

Evaluation of the impacts of land use on water quality: a case study in the Chaohu Lake Basin.

It has been widely accepted that there is a close relationship between the land use type and water quality. There have been some researches on this relationship from the perspective of the spatial configuration of land use in recent years. This study aims to analyze the influence of various land use types on the water quality within the Chaohu Lake Basin based on the water quality monitoring data and RS data from 2000 to 2008, with the small watershed as the basic unit of analysis.

[Strategies of nutrients control in lakes based on ecoregions of lakes in China].

In order to better reduce lake eutrophication, based on five ecoregions of lakes, the relationships of total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), and TN/TP ratio with chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) in 100 lakes were discussed, furthermore, strategies of nutrient control were proposed respectively. Results showed that among the five ecoregions, the lake eutrophication level was the lowest in Dongbei ecoregion and the highest in Huabei ecoregion, but the eutrophication level in lakes of all the five ecoregions is increasing in recent years. Algal growth in lakes of Dongbei and Huabei ecoregions was limited by phosphorus, while it was simultaneously limited by nitogen and phosphorus in lakes of other three ecoregions (Zhongdongbu, Yungui and Mengxin).

[Impacts of cultivated land conversion on cultivated land productivity in China: prediction and analysis].

This paper simulated the spatial patterns of cultivated land in China under the future scenario by using the Dynamics of Land System (DLS) model, and then estimated the cultivated land productivity at the grid pixel dimensions based on the Estimation System of Land Production (ESLP). In addition, the spatial patterns of cultivated land productivity in each of China agro-ecological zones were analyzed. On this basis, this paper predicted the impacts of cultivated land conversion on the cultivated land production in China in 2000-2020, and identified the major affecting factors on the cultivated land production.