Government policy is a major human factor that causes changes in land use. Thus, simulating the dynamics of land-use systems provides important information to support decisions on land management and land-use planning, and to analyze and quantify the consequences of policies. In the present study, we predicted land-use changes and their potential impacts on food security in the environmentally fragile Guyuan District, in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of north-central China, under the influence of a program to convert sloping agricultural land to conservation uses. Baseline and conservation policy scenarios (2005 to 2020) were developed based on input from local stakeholders and expert knowledge. For the baseline and conservation policies, we formulated high-, moderate-, and low-growth scenarios, analyzed the driving mechanisms responsible for the land-use dynamics, and then applied a previously developed "dynamics of land systems" model to simulate changes in land uses based on the driving mechanisms. We found that spatially explicit policies can promote the conversion of land to more sustainable uses; however, decreasing the amount of agricultural and urban land and increasing grassland and forest cover will increase the risk of grain shortages, and the effect will be more severe under the conservation and high-growth scenarios than under the baseline and low-growth scenarios. The Guyuan case study suggests that, during the next decade, important trade-offs between environmental conservation and food security will inevitably occur. Future land-use decisions should carefully consider the balance between land resource conservation, agricultural production, and urban expansion.

Transformation to a green economy depends on long-term, continuous government financial investments in the environmental protection field. This study used the budget and final accounts of provincial environmental protection expenditure in China from 2007 to 2019 to establish a two-way fixed-effects model to verify the impact of government attention on environmental protection expenditure. The sustainability of Chinese local governments’ environmental protection expenditure is weak, and the fluctuations conform to the punctuated equilibrium characteristics. Fluctuations in government attention have a significant positive impact on changes in fiscal environmental protection expenditure, and the characteristics of campaign governance are relatively obvious. Fiscal transparency can strengthen the relationship between government attention and the environmental protection expenditure budget; however, the adjustment effect on the final accounts of environmental protection expenditure, which depend more on the budget implementation process, is not significant. To improve the effectiveness of environmental governance, government departments must pay long-term and sustained attention to environmental issues, improve the transparency of the implementation process of environmental protection expenditure budgets, strengthen the role of public supervision, and ensure investment in environmental governance.