Decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions is crucial for combating the climate crisis and promoting green development. However, a uniform approach to climate mitigation exacerbates regional disharmony. As a microcosm of China’s regional heterogeneity, the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) is helpful in exploring regional collaborative climate governance. This paper uses the Thiel index, the Tapio decoupling model, and the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) decomposition approach to explore the decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions in YREB from 2005 to 2019. Results indicate that the carbon intensity difference is mainly from the difference within middle-rising provinces (MRP) and western less-developed provinces (WLP). YREB exhibits strong decoupling overall, but it is not sustained. The economic growth effect significantly promotes carbon emissions, which is more prominent in MRP. The energy intensity effect plays a vital role in restraining carbon emissions. The emission factor effect signals an improved energy structure in WLP. Regional coordination is needed to achieve green development; thus, provinces should set differentiated carbon emission reduction targets, and more potent tools are recommended in major carbon emitters.

Groundwater depletion caused by agricultural irrigation is a worldwide problem. Digital technology has the potential to mitigate the groundwater over-exploitation problem by precisely restricting agriculture groundwater withdrawal and borewell construction. This study estimates how farmers respond to a pilot on digital groundwater supervision, which was implemented by the county government to limit the number and clarify property rights of irrigation borewells. By utilizing this recent pilot in rural China, we assess the causal impact of the digital groundwater supervision pilot on farmers’ water-saving irrigation (WSI) behaviors and investigate the heterogeneity effects and mechanisms related to the policy contents. A difference-in-differences (DID) strategy is applied to address the treatment effect of the digital groundwater supervision pilot. The results, which were based on a unique plot-crop-level panel dataset, indicate that farmers reduced water use after the pilot implementation, with most of the responses created through introducing water-saving technology and reducing water use intensity rather than through reducing irrigated acreage. In addition, village supervision, information, and cooperative incentives positively encourage farmers to adopt WSI technologies.