Energy security and ecological and environmental security are some of the most basic and important preconditions for national development, and ecological compensation is an important institutional guarantee for construction of China’s ecological civilization. The Chinese government has always made it clear that it will “step up efforts to protect the ecosystem” and establish market-based and diversified ecological compensation mechanisms. However, the existing system and mechanism design of ecological environment protection has been unable to meet the needs of economic and social development in the new era. On the basis of the psychological account theory and prospect theory, this paper constructed an evaluation system of strategic mineral resources exploitation and ecological environmental protection effects in Western China using the VIKOR-AISM model. In this paper, the VIKOR-AISM model comprehensively considers the maximization of group utility and minimization of individual regrets, and conducts a cluster analysis based on the compromise value Q and its inflection $k$. The comprehensive ranking changes of evaluation subjects under different decision preferences and hesitation interval measures were studied according to the antagonist hierarchy topology. The research results provide decision-making support for China to formulate ecological compensation policies in line with regional characteristics.

Re-evaluating how urban and rural development can be integrated is a necessary step towards achieving the “dual-carbon” objective and facilitating a thorough transition towards a green and low-carbon economy and society. This study empirically investigates the geographical disparities, evolving patterns, and determinants of the effectiveness of urban–rural integration development in Sichuan and Chongqing. Results of the study indicate that (1) the effectiveness of urban–rural integration development in Sichuan and Chongqing is generally poor, and external environmental factors adversely affect the urban–rural integration of economically developed cities; (2) the urban–rural integration development efficiency in Sichuan and Chongqing does not show a more obvious polarization phenomenon, but the gap between the cities gradually widens; and (3) regarding influencing factors, market dynamics are favorable to overall urban–rural integration development in the Sichuan and Chongqing regions, while the development of the digital economy and the level of financial development can exacerbate the imbalance of regional urban–rural integration development. Based on this premise, pertinent policy suggestions are offered to facilitate the merger of urban and rural areas and foster efficient development in the regions of Sichuan and Chongqing.

Faced with both economic and environmental pressures, how to improve energy efficiency in a green way is gradually attracting attention. Reasonable environmental regulations can promote the green transformation of energy and improve green energy efficiency, which is of great practical significance for achieving global sustainable development. This paper measures the green energy efficiency of 30 Chinese provinces in 2019 based on the Super-SBM model, selects five representative antecedent conditions of three environmental regulation dimensions: command-and-control, market-incentive, and voluntary public, and uses fsQCA to explore the group effects and enhancement paths of different types of environmental regulations on green energy efficiency. The results found that (1) there are four green energy efficiency enhancement paths: government pressure type, market mobilization type, government-led public association type, and multiple subject type; (2) commandand- control type environmental regulations play an important role in enhancing green energy efficiency in most provinces; and (3) multiple subject type enhancement paths can achieve higher green energy efficiency. This study investigates the impact of environmental regulation on green energy efficiency in order to provide reference and reference for the improvement of green energy efficiency in China’s provinces.

The realization of the “double-carbon” goal will contribute to the high-quality and sustainable development of China’s economy and society, while the improvement of carbon emission efficiency in Chinese provinces will lay a solid foundation for the realization of the “double-carbon” goal. In this paper, 30 Chinese provinces are selected as research cases. MatLab software is applied to build the slacks-based measure Malmquist-Luenberger (SBM-ML) model to measure carbon efficiency. By the analysis of their carbon efficiency with the fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) method, this paper aims to find new ways to improve carbon emission efficiency. Among the data of all the provinces and municipalities, there are only four are greater than 1, revealing much room for improvement in Chinese carbon emission efficiency. The carbon emission efficiency of each province and municipality is synergistically influenced by five elements: environmental regulation, urbanization rate, marketization level, consumer price index, and government environmental expenditure. Different configurations of the five elements constitute four feasible ways to improve carbon emission efficiency. The total consistency level of 0.822277 indicates that the four paths are sufficient conditions for achieving high carbon emission efficiency. The conclusions of this paper are not only helpful in accurately grasping the carbon emission efficiency in Chinese provinces but also provide theoretical support and practical guidance for improving the carbon emission efficiency in China.