Based on the quasi-natural experiment established in China’s national key ecological function areas, this paper takes 102 counties in Hebei Province, China, from 2014 to 2018 as the research object. It uses propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods to investigate the impact of policy implementation on farmers’ income levels and constructs a mechanism using the air quality index to examine the environmental effect. The results show that when the time and regional fixed effects are not considered, the income level of farmers in the county increased by 3.11% due to the influence of the transfer payment policy, and the policy treatment effect grew over time. Among the control variables, the degree of industrialization and agriculturalization, urbanization rate and government financial scale were all positively related to farmers’ income. Controlling the fixed effects of region and year, the impact of policy on the improvement of farmers’ income was weakened, and the regression coefficient changed from 0.2211 to 0.0366, a drop of 83.45%. This suggests that the policy is greatly affected by the city where farmers live. The “environmental effect” test results showed that transfer payments could increase the income level of farmers in counties affected by the policy. The mechanism is that the priority measure of the ecological compensation policy is to improve the ecological environment, which is conducive to improving local environmental governance and environmental productivity and increasing crop yields, and thus increasing farmers’ incomes. Because the regions where the policy is implemented overlap with highly poverty-stricken areas, it is necessary for the central government to improve transfer payment standards and enrich their content to protect people’s livelihood while promoting ecological protection. As a result, local governments will be encouraged to act ecologically, vigorously develop local ecological industries, and promote the internalization of positive externalities in ecological environmental services, further improving the level of agricultural modernization and ecological sustainability and improving the income levels of farmers and their quality of life.

In the past decade, the Chinese paper industry, which is highly polluting and energy intensive, has shown overall increases in production, sales, income, and profit, although the growth rate has declined. Overall, China’s paper industry exhibits small-scale and scattered distribution, characterized by continuous overcapacity and outdated technical knowledge. This has inevitably resulted in a variety of serious environmental problems during its development. Owing to the environmental problems resulting from the development of the paper industry, various environmental regulatory policies and measures have been adopted in China, mainly command-and-control, market-based, and voluntary policies and measures. This study identifies and analyzes particular issues inherent to China’s environmental regulatory policies and measures regarding the paper industry and proposed policy suggestions for improving the environmental regulation of China’s paper industry.

Reducing carbon emissions per capita has been one of the vital goals of sustainable development of the world's energy and human health since the 18th century. Unfortunately, China had become one of the world's largest carbon emitting country for the last 13 years which carbon dioxide emissions accounting for more than 25% of the world's total carbon emissions in 2018. Therefore, this article firstly to apply the IPAT and STIRPAT model to analyze the influencing factors of carbon emissions per capita which will be used to build the VENSIM model. It can be conducted that the main factors including industrial structure, energy structure, population and technology factors and social fixed assets investment. Then, the paper carries out for three simulating scenarios which are baseline scenario, reduction scenario and limited scenario, respectively.The simulation results show that the total CO₂ intensity of the limited scenario will reach 0.80 million tons/per yuan as the lowest point in 2030. Finally, the paper combines carbon system simulation results, based on the influence factors of city carbon emissions system, low carbon economy, energy and social system of low carbon city development suggestions are put forward to solve these issues.