In an increasingly digital age, studying how the digital economy affects carbon emissions is important for China’s dual carbon goals. Based on the panel data of 30 provinces and regions in China from 2012 to 2020, the impact of the digital economy on carbon emissions in China and the mechanism of its effect are empirically analyzed. This study reveals that the digital economy has an inverted U-shaped impact on China’s carbon emissions. Initially, it promotes carbon emissions but later inhibits them. The carbon emission reduction effect is more significant after the digital economy reaches the inflection point of the inverted U-shape in the more economically developed regions. Energy structure and energy use efficiency are the two key factors through which the digital economy affects China’s carbon emissions. Among them, the digital economy shows an inverted U-shaped effect on energy structure, which is first positive and then negative, and a positive U-shaped effect on energy use efficiency, which is first negative and then positive. Based on the above findings, this paper suggests that: First, to achieve peak carbon and carbon neutrality, the digital economy needs to be strengthened and the foundations of the digital economy need to be consolidated. Second, the digital transformation of the energy sector should be accelerated, and digitalization should lead to the low-carbon energy transformation. Finally, in the process of developing the digital economy, attention should be paid to the rebound in energy consumption caused by a large number of basic digital facilities, and the low-carbon integration of the digital economy and traditional industries is of great significance in reducing carbon emissions.

The concept of sustainable livelihood garnered a prominent status in humanitarian and international development organizations that aim to calculate and build a livelihood for agroforestry farmers. However, it is difficult to measure and analyze as well as visualize the data of livelihood improvement from agroforestry (AF). This paper comparatively assessed 400 smallholder farmers’ livelihood through AF and conventional farming (CF) systems in the Northern Irrigated Plain of Pakistan. The findings showed that AF has a mixed impact on farmers’ livelihood capital, including human, physical, natural, financial and social capital. Specifically, AF significantly improved financial capital in terms of timber, non-timber and fuel wood income. Furthermore, the physical capital (buffalo plough, generators and sprinklers), natural capital (the extent of cultivated land and land ownership; the number of households (HHs) growing vegetables, fruit crops and medicinal crops) and social capital (the number of social groups that HHs involved and number of HHs sharing crop seeds) of AF farmer HHs were significantly improved compared to those of CF farmers. However, the results show that financial capital gain through crop income, HHs owning high-value vehicles (tractors) and farmers trust and collective activities were significantly higher in CF farmers than AF ones. Therefore, to enhance the contribution of AF to rural livelihood, advanced extension services and government involvement on research planning and implementing are needed.

The natural forest protection and restoration (NFPR) system is imperfect due to contradictions between the objectives of natural forest protection and the reality of situations, outdated cultivation concepts, conflicting interests among participating parties, and the lack of regulation guarantees and assessment criteria. These problems are not only common in China but also in international forest protection. As the NFPR system is more focused on the protection of natural forests, the level of natural forest restoration in China has been poor, with low natural forest quality and forest productivity. At the same time, the value of natural forest ecosystem services does not match the demand of farmers, forest management, and other multiple participating parties. As a result, except for the government, other multiple parties lack the intrinsic motivation to participate in NFPR, ultimately forming a sustainable management dilemma. Under the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework, the objective of this research was to explore the influencing factors and outcomes of the participation of multiple parties in NFPR and to construct a multiple parties’ participation mechanism for solving this dilemma. This research found that among external variables, multiple parties’ characteristics, biophysical conditions, attributes of community, and rules-in-use jointly influence and constitute the driving mechanism of multiple parties’ participation in NFPR. The rules-in-use directly impact the participation action scenario and regulate the other three external variables. Various factors and mechanisms in NFPR interact in the action space and produce outcomes that create positive incentives for each external variable, thus promoting the whole mechanism to achieve a virtuous cycle of sustainable management. This study provides a theoretical contribution to understanding the behavior of multiple parties participating in NFPR.

Agricultural socialized services (ASS) play an important role in connecting smallholders with modern agriculture and in strengthening agricultural economic resilience (AER). Using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces for 2011–2022, this study applies two-way fixed-effects, mediation, and threshold models to examine the effect of ASS on AER and the associated mechanisms. The results show that: (1) ASS significantly enhances AER, and this finding remains robust after excluding municipalities and the COVID-19 period; (2) the positive effect of ASS is more pronounced in non-major grain-producing regions than in major grain-producing regions; (3) ASS strengthens AER by reducing agricultural product import dependence and expanding agricultural operation scale; and (4) agricultural industrial restructuring exhibits a threshold effect, with the effect of ASS becoming positive when the restructuring coefficient exceeds 0.0057. Based on these findings, this study recommends improving the agricultural socialized service system, strengthening domestic agricultural supply capacity, diversifying supply channels, promoting land transfer and moderate-scale operations, and aligning service policies with regional industrial restructuring.