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The utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources has an overall and long-term impact on agricultural development. However, owing to serious wastage of agricultural water resources for a long time, low utilization efficiency of such water resources has become a common problem in developing countries. Past studies have paid scant attention to the impact of soft factors, namely farmers' educational level and market-oriented reforms, especially in a quantified form, on the improvement of agricultural water utilization efficiency. This study adopted the system Generalized Method of Moments estimation method of a dynamic panel model and used provincial panel data from China for 2007–2020 period. The results show that the utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources can indeed be improved by either promoting farmers' education levels or deepening market-oriented reforms. However, with the advancement of market-oriented reforms, the influence of farmers' education level on the utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources gradually weakens, which is due to the "agricultural to non-agricultural" effect. Finally, this paper proposes policy suggestions to improve the utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources from three perspectives: improving the education level of farmers, optimizing the agricultural water pricing system, and improving the agricultural water rights trading system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global climate change and its possible ecological consequences have become the focused issue (IPCC, 2007; Mann et al., 2008; Ding et al., 2009). The Holocene contains the analogous characteristic of future climatic change and the continuous agriculture activity, providing the ideal “similar pattern” for studying the climate change and human adaption and impact in the future. Based on the recent studies of stalagmite, ice core, ocean, and lake etc., the paper introduces the new progress in the Holocene climate and agriculture research in China as follows: (1) Discuss the variability, amplitude, and unstable characteristic of climate, as well as the abrupt events and mechanisms of climate. (2) Analyze the botanical index records for studying the early agriculture. (3) Review the agricultural origin, expanding, and development. (4) Reveal the style and intensity of early agriculture and understand the agricultural impact and adaption to the environmental changes. (5) Introduce ongoing research projects in China and emphasize the significance of increasing the dating precision and the indicative effectiveness of proxies. (6) Realize how the ecosystem and environmental factors respond to the increasing temperature process, understand how the human adapt to the rapid climate change, and provide the scientific basis for assessing the effects of climate change and the human adaption in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]