Urbanization is a powerful symbol and an inevitable human economic and social development trend. This process affects carbon dioxide emissions by changing the human output and lifestyle and encroaches over the carbon sink areas by adjusting the land use types impacting the regional carbon balance. We systematically analyzed the influence of urbanization on regional net CO₂ emissions (NCE) and built a quantitative model for the impact of urbanization on NCE based on population, economy, and land use. Based on this, the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) in China has been selected as an example to measure the characteristics of the spatial and temporal evolution of NCE from 2005 to 2018 by empirically testing the contributions of population urbanization, economic urbanization, and land urbanization to the NCE changes in YREB. According to the study’s findings, the carbon-neutral pressure index of the YREB increased over the study period, with an increase in NCE from 1706.50 Mt to 3106.05 Mt. The contribution of urbanization in this process increased and subsequently decreased in an inverted U pattern with a drop in the cumulative net emission of 260.32 Mt. The inflection points of the cumulative impact of urbanization on NCE in the midstream and upstream regions occurred in 2011 and 2010, respectively. Due to the high degree of urbanization and economic growth in the downstream area, the urbanization impact demonstrated a constant reduction of NCE over the research period. In terms of sub-dimensions, the population and land urbanization effects were consistently positive, while the economic urbanization affected the NCE and displayed an inverted U pattern during the study period. If the variation in regional carbon sink space is ignored, the impact of urbanization on CO₂ emission reduction will be overestimated. We investigated the realization path of differentiated synergistic emission reduction strategies in the great river economic belts based on the empirical study on YREB.

Water resource tax can regulate water consumption through economic leveraging, enhance water conservation awareness among enterprises and society, and optimize the industrial structure, thus promoting rational water resource use and sustainable development. However, the current water resource tax reform in China is still in the pilot exploration stage, and it is unclear if it will actually increase agricultural water use efficiency. We built a multi-period double-difference model and a mediation effect model based on 2011–2022 inter-provincial panel data in order to investigate the water resource tax reform’s impact on agricultural water conservation and its trajectory. The findings demonstrate that agricultural water use efficiency has been greatly increased by the water resource tax reform, and this conclusion remains strong even after parallel trend and placebo testing. The tax reform has primarily increased agricultural water use efficiency through crop cultivation structural adjustments and water-saving technologies’ advancement. When examining inter-provincial disparities, we found a more evident policy impact in economically developed and water-scarce regions. Further results show that the water resource tax reform has significantly reduced the groundwater portion of the regional water use structure, which indicates that it has synergistically curbed groundwater exploitation and promoted regional ecological restoration. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that the policy has realized water conservation in agriculture while avoiding a negative effect on agricultural economic growth.

Energy and water resources function as the base for humans’ socioeconomic development, which are closely linked with each other in the production process. With the rapid economic development, the contradiction between the supply and demand of energy and water resources has become acute. Meanwhile, the carbon reduction goals further enhanced the energy and water constraints, which inevitably have a significant impact on economic growth. Exploring the effect of energy and water constraints on the economic growth under climate goals is essential for policy maker to minimize the economic loss during carbon control. To realize this aim, we introduced the modified Romers’ economic growth model to estimate the impact of energy-water constraints on economic growth based on relative data in 30 provinces in China from 2000 to 2019. Then the spatial-temporal characteristics of the energy-water drag effects on China’s economic growth have been analyzed. We further applied scenario analysis method to investigate the changes in growth drag effects of energy and water resources under carbon mitigation goals in 2025 and 2030. The results show that China’s economic growth rate was reduced by 7.72% and 7.99% during the study period due to energy and water resources constraints respectively. In terms of the temporal trend, the energy-water growth drag effect shows a downward trend as a whole during 2000–2019, and the growth drag of energy on economic growth is slightly greater than that of water resources. As to spatial distribution, regions with high constraint effects of energy and water on economic growth are mainly located in the East China, while some north regions feature low energy-water constraints. According to the simulation results, China’s energy-water drag effects on the economic growth are 6.85% and 7.03% respectively, under the baseline and strong carbon control scenarios, higher than the 6.53% under the weak carbon control. Based on this, this paper proposes to design targeted energy-water constraint strategies and promote production efficiency to achieve a win-win situation of economic development and dual-carbon goals.