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In contrast to the overpopulation predicted by the population explosion theory in the 1960s, the issue of depopulation has attracted increasing attention from governments and scholars around the world. To explore the driving factors that have affected the birth rate in China, we obtained data on the birth rates in 31 Chinese provinces from 1990 to 2019. We then conducted feasible generalized least-squares regression analysis to identify the key factors. The results show that marketization, education level, and the proportions of secondary and tertiary industries were the key factors contributing to the decreasing birth rate, whereas improvements of transportation and medical services supported the desire to have children. Although the degree of influence of different factors differed over time and across regions, the economic and educational factors remained important and should not be underestimated. We propose that if the government wants to increase the willingness of young men and women to have children and help China to maintain a sustainable population, it should reduce the economic and opportunity costs of childbearing and the burden of raising children. Our methodology and outcomes will provide a reference for other countries that must identify key driving factors to support the development of their own population policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 2000s, China has carried out extensive "grain-for-green" and grazing exclusion practices to combat desertification in the desertification-prone region (DPR). However, the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of these practices remain unclear. We quantify and compare the changes in fractional vegetation cover (FVC) with economic and population data in the DPR before and after the implementation of these environmental programmes. Here we show that climatic change and CO2 fertilization are relatively strong drivers of vegetation rehabilitation from 2001-2020 in the DPR, and the declines in the direct incomes of farmers and herders caused by ecological practices exceed the subsidies provided by governments. To minimize economic hardship, enhance food security, and improve the returns on policy investments in the DPR, China needs to adapt its environmental programmes to address the potential impacts of future climate change and create positive synergies to combat desertification and improve the economy in this region. This paper shows that desertification combating practices decline incomes of farmers and herders, and China needs to adapt its ecological programmes to address the impacts of climate change and create positive synergies to combat desertification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sustainability of land conversion to urban use is an important factor that promotes sustainable urbanization. However, China's local governments have relied too much on the land finance model for urbanization, which has led to disordered growth of urban land, ultimately posing a threat to ecosystem security and socioeconomic development. Effectively evaluating the factors that influence the growth of urban land is critical to improving the sustainability of urban land use. In this study, we explored the factors that affect the growth in the area of urban land using spatial analysis models based on panel data for Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2019. We found that fiscal decentralization, infrastructure, industrialization, and industrial upgrading were the main factors responsible for the growth of urban land, but that their degrees of influence differed between regions. Our findings identify the necessity for local governments to design urban land-use policies and perform strategic planning for urban land use to improve sustainability based on the main factors that influenced the growth of urban land in each region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization is an important engine of modernization and economic growth, and appears to be an inevitable trend during the development of human society. We combined economic, population, and land urbanization factors to develop a comprehensive indicator, the comprehensive level of urbanization (CLU). We then used 10 sub-indicators from four dimensions (economic, political, social, and resource endowment) and panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2000 to 2018 to conduct panel quantile regressions that accounted for the heterogeneity of the data and a contribution analysis to determine the key factors that are driving CLU. We found that the industrial structure and marketization (the development of market mechanisms) were important factors that increased CLU, and the contribution of marketization increased with increasing quantile, whereas China's land finance model (in which provinces raise operating funds through land sales) decreased CLU in regions where urbanization had progressed most. Therefore, accelerating market development, reducing the government's reliance on the land finance model as urbanization matured, and improving the industrial structure by promoting industrial transformation through improved education and technology will be the keys to achieving high-quality urbanization in the future. The successes and failures of China's urbanization process will provide lessons for other developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sandstorms and soil erosion are serious problems around the world, but particularly in arid northern China. In response to these problems, the Chinese government has implemented the world's largest shelter forest construction project: the Three North Shelter Forest Program (TNSFP). However, we do not know how successful the program has been, because no one has carried out a comprehensive cost–benefit analysis. To analyze the benefits of the different ecological restoration methods implemented under the TNSFP and provide guidance for future ecological restoration efforts, we developed an improved cost–benefit analysis method that considers as many of the benefits and costs (including opportunity costs) as possible, subject to data availability, thereby clarifying the net benefit after accounting for these costs. We found different net benefits for the restoration types implemented under the TNSFP. The lowest net benefit was for afforestation by planting, at − 6.8 × 103 RMB ha−1 year−1, which was negative due to its high costs; in contrast, the highest net benefit was for fruit tree plantations, at 53.3 × 103 RMB ha−1 year−1, and this resulted from its high product value. There were large differences among regions in China, which indicates that the regional governments should adjust the balance among the ecological restoration measures in their region to account for the unique local conditions and maximize the net benefits of ecological restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the driving factors behind regional income inequality to provide an important reference for China and other developing countries and to support the formulation of more effective regional development policies. The study used data from 625 county-level administrative units in China in 2017 and conducted a total factor analysis of China's regional income based on 10 economic dimensions using spatially explicit regression methods. The results show that commerce, population footprint, industrialization, and investment are the main factors that affected a Chinese region's income, but different factors have different degrees of influence in different regions. The impact of economic institutions (developing an institutionally diverse market economy) on income cannot be ignored. Based on our findings, China should give local governments more autonomy, so they can formulate strategies that account for local constraints and opportunities, thereby increasing their chances of decreasing regional income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization is a dominant component of social and economic development around the world, but this process creates tremendous pressure on the ecological environment. How to achieve coordination between urbanization and conservation of this environment has become a key issue, especially in developing countries. It is necessary to identify the driving factors that affect this coordination. To identify these factors, we chose 290 Chinese prefecture-level cities to analyze the driving factors behind urbanization using spatial regression analysis, and explored the spatial differences among regions in these factors. Our results show that industrial upgrading and technological progress were the main factors that promoted coordinated development, with industrialization having positive effects under government management, but with differences among regions in how the driving forces affected coordinated development. Using technological progress to promote industrial upgrading, creating new employment to absorb surplus rural labor, and providing workers with skills training so they can take advantage of new jobs can promote win–win solutions that coordinate urbanization with conservation of the ecological environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ecological restoration and conservation are primary components of sustainable development around the world, particularly during the contemporary era of climate change. However, restoration and conservation are not free; they consume huge amounts of resources that would otherwise support social and economic development. Therefore, excessive conservation creates a risk of creating rather than eliminating poverty. Unfortunately, scientists have largely ignored the balance between these contrasting goals. Here, we discuss the concept of finding the threshold that represents a suitable balance between ecological conservation and economic development, thereby maximizing the benefits for both humans and the environment and promoting sustainable development. To demonstrate the concept, we examined China's ecological restoration achievements and discussed some of the unforeseen negative consequences that accompanied these achievements to discuss how future policies could better balance ecological and socioeconomic goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States are independent territories in which governance is implemented by government agents, because states are complex systems that cannot spontaneously self-govern. However, governments sometimes forget that they are only agents of the state, and attempt to obtain a monopoly on power by controlling elected officials and the operation of the state. History has shown that this approach leads to errors in political development because government agents do not always act in the best interests of the state and its people. Centralized authority is often accompanied by the abuse of power, corruption, poverty, and a loss of human rights. To help countries avoid repeating these tragedies, this paper has proposed a model of institutional evolution in which state institutions can evolve to support peaceful socioeconomic development that benefits both the poor and the wealthy by avoiding institutional lock in. Statesmen must account for the lessons described in this paper to better understand and account for the difference between the state and its government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protection of the ecological environment is an effective strategy for maintaining ecosystem health, improving provision of ecosystem services, and increasing human well-being. However, traditional calculations of the value of ecosystem services (VES) provide weak guidance because they ignore the costs of these services, leading to economically inefficient strategies. To understand the difference between VES and the net ecosystem services value (NES, after subtracting costs from VES) and to improve evaluations of ecosystem services, we estimated NES for mainland China (including farmland, grassland, forest, and wetland). NES totaled 10.0×103 RMB ha−1 yr−1 in 2014, which is only 35.1% of the corresponding VES. Grassland NES was-0.7×103 RMB ha−1 yr−1, in contrast with a positive grassland VES. NES of farmland, grassland, forest, and wetland in 2014 totaled 7.2×1012 RMB, accounting for 27.0% of China’s GNP. Recent Chinese planning based on VES emphasizes forest conservation and ignores the conservation of other important ecosystems, such as grassland, leading to a continuing loss of China’s natural capital. Due to regional differences in economic conditions, resource endowments, and geographical characteristics, VES and NES differ among regions. To maximize the ecological benefits from conservation, it is necessary to account for these differences by comparing strategies based on NES, thereby choosing projects that maximize both economic and ecological benefits. To maintain the ecological balance, ecological restoration and socioeconomic activities should account for the costs of providing ecosystem services. This is essential to minimize the costs and maximize the benefits of projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People who live in ecologically fragile environments face both poverty and environmental degradation, which reinforce each other and create a 'poverty trap.' Traditional ecological restoration projects focus only on ecological measures, and thus ignore the livelihoods of local residents. Those projects therefore fail to solve the poverty trap. In addition, project subsidies to residents typically end when the projects end, thus forcing residents to return to their old way of life and reversing the gains from the projects. To break this cycle, we performed a study in China's Yanan City, in Shaanxi Province, to promote a new 'green purchase' method for implementing sustainable economic activities that bring residents ongoing earnings without harming the environment. This method involves the construction of terraced fields, establishment of fruit tree orchards, implementation of grazing restrictions, and ecological migration. We found that the method was ecologically effective, as it increased Yanan's vegetation cover by 0.89% annually since 1999, which is twice the rate for Shaanxi Province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions are effective means by which human societies resolve conflicts over the use of scarce resources and maintain social stability. Institutions evolve as human knowledge improves or as the situation changes. To find suitable principles to guide institutional evolution, we reviewed examples of historical institutional evolution in China to seek guidance for the evolution of other modern institutions. We found that gradualism, win-win paths, stability, neutrality, and cultural diversity are key principles for successful institutional evolution. However, fear of the uncertainty associated with institutional change and changing external conditions will affect the results of institutional change. Designers of new or revised institutions should use publicity and education, combined with gradualism (pilot tests), and measures to ensure neutrality and political stability, to increase acceptance of institutional evolution. In both politics and economics, institutional change can be a long evolutionary process, and it's necessary to balance the changes in political institutions with economic development throughout the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States are autonomous political units that unite many communities within their territory, and whose centralized government has the power to collect taxes, draft citizens for work or war, and decree and enforce laws. States attempt to solve the problem of allocating scarce resources because the growth in human needs due to long-term, continuous population increases has always exceeded growth in the environmental carrying capacity. In these self-governed independent territories, people, communities, corporations, and public wealth are protected by complex combinations of individual and collective property rights. However, this stage of social institutional evolution may be forced to change as human populations decline (because many women now reject the option of having children) while improved science, technology, and social institutions solve or mitigate the problem of resource scarcity. In response, the political ecology of states will need to evolve to meet new challenges and develop new institutions that can promote environmentally sustainable social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intriguing feature of China's rapid socioeconomic development during the past 30 years is the new path it appears to represent for other developing countries. Unfortunately, the risks associated with China's model are severe; they include a growing gap between the rich and poor caused by an unbalanced supply of social welfare, environmental degradation caused by unsustainable development, growing risks to food security caused by farmland degradation, damage to China's international reputation, and growing social turbulence as a result of runaway corruption. These problems will jeopardize China's achievements if the current path continues to be pursued without intervention by the central government to solve these problems. To provide insights into the damage being caused by China's socioeconomic development model, we provide examples of problems that have arisen during the current period of reform and that must be avoided by other developing countries that hope to emulate China's rapid development without incurring the same costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing the connections between a culture and its environment provides an important perspective on a neglected aspect of coupled natural and social systems. Based on the history of grassland degradation in Northern China, we found that cultural invasions (the replacement of an indigenous culture by an invading population's culture) have profoundly affected the local environment and the connections between humans and nature. The environment shapes and is shaped by culture, and we concluded that invasion of a grassland region by an agricultural culture was one of the underlying reasons for land degradation in this region. We discuss how current environmental policy in China, including the ecological migration policy, is inappropriate and harm transmission of important cultural knowledge, and suggest that environmental managers both re-establish traditional practices and find ways for these practices to coexist with newer practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many societies face an income gap between rich regions with access to advanced technology and regions that are rich in natural resources but poorer in technology. This 'resource curse' can lead to a Kuznets trap, in which economic inequalities between the rich and the poor increase during the process of socioeconomic development. This can also lead to depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation, social instability, and declining socioeconomic development. These problems will jeopardize China's achievements if the current path continues to be pursued without intervention by the government to solve the problems. To mitigate the socioeconomic development gap between western and eastern China, the government implemented its Western Development Program in 2000. However, recent data suggest that this program has instead worsened the resource curse. Because each region has its own unique strengths and weaknesses, China must escape the resource curse by accounting for this difference; in western China, this can be done by improving education, promoting high-tech industry, adjusting its economic strategy to balance regional development, and seeking more sustainable approaches to socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has among the highest biodiversities in the world, but faces extreme biodiversity losses due to the country's huge population and its recent explosive socioeconomic development. Despite huge efforts and investments by the government and Chinese society to conserve biodiversity, especially in recent decades, biodiversity losses may not have been reversed, and may even have been exacerbated by unintended consequences resulting from these projects. China's centralized approach to biodiversity conservation, with limited local participation, creates an inflexible and inefficient approach because of conflicts between local communities and national administrators over the benefits. Although community-based conservation may be an imperfect approach, it is an essential component of a successful future national conservation plan. Biodiversity conservation should be considered from the perspective of systems engineering and a governance structure that combines centralization with community-level conservation. In this paper, we describe China's complex challenge: how to manage interactions between humans and nature to find win-win solutions that can ensure long-term biodiversity conservation without sacrificing human concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China leads the world in afforestation, and is one of the few countries whose forested area is increasing. However, this massive 'greening' effort has been less effective than expected; afforestation has sometimes produced unintended environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic consequences, and has failed to achieve the desired ecological benefits. Where afforestation has succeeded, the approach was tailored to local environmental conditions. Using the right plant species or species composition for the site and considering alternatives such as grassland restoration have been important success factors. To expand this success, government policy should shift from a forest-based approach to a results-based approach. In addition, long-term monitoring must be implemented to provide the data needed to develop a cost-effective, scientifically informed restoration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After more than two decades of negotiation, the China–Russia gas deal represents a new era of energy cooperation between China and Russia. In total, this is a win–win deal for both sides. For China, the deal will decrease energy consumption and carbon emission but will not significantly influence air quality; for Russia, it will provide a new market for its gas resources. In this study, we calculated the energy consumption, carbon emission, and particulate matter pollution (PM2.5 and PM10) in China in 2020, 2030, 2040, and 2050 under four IPCC representative concentration pathways (RCPs 8.5, 6.0, 4.5, and 2.6). We found that energy consumption and carbon emission decreased under the gas deal in RCPs 8.5, 6.0, and 4.5, although the rate of decrease slowed over time; however, in RCP 2.6, the rate of decrease of energy consumption and emission increased over time. PM2.5 and PM10 emission showed similar trends but with increasing rate, although the gas deal would mitigate air pollution in the short term. Although China's government hopes to reduce carbon and pollutant emission under the deal, our results suggest that additional mitigation measures will be necessary to achieve this goal. Nonetheless, the reduction in carbon emission suggests that the China–Russia gas deal provides a model that other countries can follow to slow climate change. Sustainability: Gas deal with Russia helps to protect China's air, but in short term The China–Russia gas deal is supposed to decrease carbon emissions and improve air quality and it does, but with time these effects slow down. A team led by Sergey Venevsky from Tsinghua and Minzu Universities in Beijing calculated the energy consumption, carbon emission, and particulate matter pollution in China in 2020, 2030, 2040, and 2050 under four development scenarios of the world's development, suggested by international experts. Energy consumption and carbon emissions are decreased under the gas deal for all but one (the worst) world development scenario, but the rate of decrease slowed over time. Air particulate pollution emissions showed similar trends. China's government hopes to reduce carbon and pollution emissions under the deal, however, our results show that additional mitigation measures are necessary for achieve this goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Desertification is the result of complex interactions among various factors, including climate change and human activities. However, previous research generally focused on either meteorological factors associated with climate change or human factors associated with human activities, and lacked quantitative assessments of their interaction combined with long-term monitoring. Thus, the roles of climate change and human factors in desertification remain uncertain. To understand the factors that determine whether mitigation programs can contribute to desertification control and vegetation cover improvements in desertified areas of China, and the complex interactions that affect their success, we used a pooled regression model based on panel data to calculate the relative roles of climate change and human activities on the desertified area and on vegetation cover (using the normalized-difference vegetation index, NDVI, which decreases with increasing desertification) from 1983 to 2012. We found similar effect magnitudes for socioeconomic and environmental factors for NDVI but different results for desertification: socioeconomic factors were the dominant factor that affected desertification, accounting for 79.3% of the effects. Climate change accounted for 46.6 and 20.6% of the effects on NDVI and desertification, respectively. Therefore, desertification control programs must account for the integrated effects of both socioeconomic and natural factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]