As one of China’s most common vegetation types, grasslands comprise about 27.5% of its terrestrial area and 41% of its carbon storage. Since climate change (CC) and human activities (HA) have a great effect on grasslands, quantifying the contributions of CC and HA on grassland net primary productivity (NPP) is crucial in understanding the mechanisms of grassland regional carbon balances. However, current approaches, including residual trend, biophysical model and environmental background-based methods, have limitations on different scales, especially on the national scale of China. To improve assessment accuracy, modifications to the environmental background-based method were introduced in calculating the CC and HA contributions to the actual NPP (ANPP). In this study, the grassland ANPP in national nature reserves was defined as the environmental background value (PNPP), which was only affected by CC and without HA. The pixel PNPP outside the nature reserves could be replaced by the pixel PNPP in the nature reserve with the most similar habitat in the same natural ecological geographical division. The impact of HA on grassland ANPP (HNPP) could be identified by calculating the difference between PNPP and ANPP. Finally, the contributions of CC and HA to ANPP changes were assessed by the trends of ANPP, PNPP, and HNPP. The results showed that the average grassland ANPP significantly increased from 2001 to 2020. CC contributed 71.0% to ANPP change, whereas HA contributed 29.0%. Precipitation was the main contributor to grassland growth among arid and semi-arid regions, while temperature inhibited productivity in these areas. HA was the major cause of degradation in China’s grasslands, although the effects have declined over time. The research could provide support support for government decisions. It could also provide a new and feasible research method for quantitatively evaluating grasslands and other ecosystems.

Net ecosystem productivity (NEP) plays a vital role in quantifying the carbon exchange between the atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems. Understanding the effects of dominant driving forces and their respective contribution rates on NEP can aid in the effective management of terrestrial carbon sinks, especially in rapidly urbanizing coastal areas where climate change (CC) and human activities (HA) occur frequently. Combining MODIS NPP products and meteorological data from 2000 to 2020, this paper established a Modis NPP-Soil heterotrophic respiration (R_h) model to estimate the magnitude of NEP in China’s coastal zone (CCZ). Hotspot analysis, variation trend, partial correlation, and residual analysis were applied to explore the spatiotemporal patterns of NEP and the contributions of CC and HA to the dynamics of NEP. We also explored the changes in NEP in different land use types. It was found that there is a clear north–south difference in the spatial pattern of NEP in CCZ, with Zhejiang Province serving as the main watershed for this difference. In addition, NEP in most regions showed an improvement trend, especially in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei region and Shandong Province, but the pixel values of NEP here were generally not as high as that in most southern provinces. According to the types of driving forces, the improvement of NEP in these regions primarily results from the synergistic effects of CC and HA. NEP changes in provinces south of Zhejiang are mainly dominated by single-factor-driven degradation. The area where HA contributes to the increase in NEP is much larger than that of CC. From the perspective of land use types, forests and farmland are the dominant contributors to the magnitude of NEP in CCZ.