In recent years, despite global improvements in development, food scarcity and waste remain critical issues impacting food security, human health, and environmental sustainability. China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs reports that China’s food loss and waste rate is approximately 22.7%, amounting to 460 million tons annually, with the consumption and post-harvest processing stages facing the highest losses. To address these issues, China enacted the Anti-Food Waste Law in 2021, aiming to reduce food waste through clear responsibilities, incentives, and penalties for government agencies and relevant stakeholders. While scholars note that the law represents a significant shift from moral to legal governance in tackling food waste, some argue that its provisions lack sufficient specificity. This article assesses the effectiveness of China’s anti-food waste legislation using case studies and comparative analyses, highlighting the challenges in defining and implementing the law within China’s cultural framework, where food signifies abundance and prosperity. Additionally, the article explores successful international practices, including the 2030 Champions Program and similar efforts in Europe and Japan, to inform China’s strategy. The key recommendations for policy improvement include strengthening accountability and governance, establishing a food hierarchy for sustainable resource management, enhancing data collection on food waste, promoting food donation mechanisms, and transitioning from a solely government-led regulatory approach to a multi-dimensional co-regulation model.

China announced it will achieve a carbon emission peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 to fulfill its international obligations and mitigate climate risk. Related activities and polices were introduced in several sectors before this announcement. The performance and outcome of these activities provide necessary a priori knowledge for the designation and optimization of future policies. In this study, a comprehensive evaluation covering major sectors based on multisource data is proposed. The results show that although China is the largest CO₂ emitter for the current stage, the increasing rate of carbon emissions has been significantly mitigated since the 2010s. This reduction in emissions can be accelerated by the carbon-trading scheme in pilot regions. As a substitution for fossil energy, there have been tens of thousands of increases in wind turbines and photovoltaic plants in the past decade. Additionally, an enhancement of the terrestrial carbon sink was detected by time-series remote sensing data. The results of this study demonstrate that China’s carbon activities in the past decade have received reasonable outcomes, which will benefit the optimization of related government policies. The improved legislation and policies of China can strengthen the regulation of emissions while promoting the quantity and quality of carbon sinks. At the same time, the improvement of the carbon emissions trading mechanism, especially the establishment of a marketing regulation mechanism, can significantly motivate interest-related communities and industries to abort high-carbon emissions and ensure the implementation of carbon neutrality in the future.