China’s agriculture green development: from concept to actions

Highlights

● A target-threshold indicator evaluation system is proposed to measure China’s agriculture transformation.

● Evaluation based on a development score showed China is currently at a medium level in the Agriculture Green Development initiative.

● There was a trend for increasing development scores for 2010–2020 compared to 1997–2010.

● Trade-offs between eco-environmental factors and socioeconomic/food production factors were found to be the major barriers to the transformation.

● More effort is needed to address the insufficient and uneven development to provide coordinated improvement.

Abstract

China has initiated a green transformation plan in 2015, which was soon applied to agriculture, known as the Agriculture Green Development (AGD) initiative, with the goals of achieving food security, high resource use efficiency, and an ecofriendly environment. To assess the agricultural transformation from 1997 to 2020, this paper proposes a national-scale indicator system consisting three dimensions (socioeconomic, food production and eco-environmental) and ten sub-dimensions to quantify the AGD score. This study showed that AGD score in China was at a moderate level during 1997–2010, scoring 40 out of 100. During this stage, decreased scores in the sub-dimensions of resource consumption, environmental quality, and environmental cost have offset the improvement in the socioeconomic dimension, resulting in fluctuated scores around 40. In the second stage (2011–2020), China’s AGD score improved but still at moderate level, scoring an average of 46.3, with each dimension increasing by 5.3%–25.0%. These results indicate that China has made progress in the agricultural transformation, transitioning from conceptualization to actions through the implementation of various policies and projects. However, the study emphasizes the need for more effort to address the insufficient and unbalanced development, along with the growing eco-environmental challenges, especially the trade-offs among dimensions.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

agricultural transformation / Agriculture Green Development / historical trend / indicator system / theoretical conception

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at https:doi:org/10.15302/J-FASE-2023512 contains supplementary material (Table S1).

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by Yunnan Provincial Major Science and Technology Special Project (202102AE090030), the Strategic Consulting Project of Chinese Academy of Engineering (2022-XY-49), China Scholarship Council (201913043), and Hainan University.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Haixing Zhang, Yuan Feng, Yanxiang Jia, Pengqi Liu, Yong Hou, Jianbo Shen, Qichao Zhu, and Fusuo Zhang declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. All applicable institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2023. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)