Unleashing the land sector’s potential for climate mitigation requires purpose-driven changes in land management. However, contributions of past management changes to the current global and regional carbon cycles remain unclear. Here, we use vegetation modelling to reveal how a portfolio of ecological restoration policies has impacted China’s terrestrial carbon balance through developing counterfactual ‘no-policy’ scenarios. Pursuing conventional policies and assuming no changes in climate or atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) since 1980 would have led China’s land sector to be a carbon source of 0.11 Pg C yr⁻¹ for 2001–2020, in stark contrast to a sink of 175.9 Tg C yr⁻¹ in reality. About 72.7% of this difference can be attributed to land management changes, including afforestation and reforestation (49.0%), reduced wood extraction (21.8%), fire prevention and suppression (1.6%) and grassland grazing exclusion (0.3%). The remaining 27.3% come from changes in atmospheric CO₂ (42.2%) and climate (−14.9%). Our results underscore the potential of active land management in achieving ‘carbon-neutrality’ in China.

The extensive implementation of the ‘Grain for Green’ project over the Loess Plateau has improved environmental quality. However, it has resulted in a greater consumption of soil water, and its overall hydrological effects remain highly controversial. Our study utilized a coupled land-atmosphere model to evaluate the effects of vegetation changes resulting from revegetation or reclamation on the hydrology of the Loess Plateau. Revegetation was found to stimulate an increase in precipitation, evapotranspiration, and atmospheric water content. However, the increase in precipitation was insufficient to compensate for soil water loss driven by intensified evapotranspiration, resulting in a decrease in both runoff and soil water content. In contrast to revegetation, reclamation would reduce precipitation, although the reduction was less than the decrease in evapotranspiration. This could lead to an increase in both runoff and soil water content. The results provide an important scientific basis for the hydrological effects of vegetation changes on the Loess Plateau, which is particularly important for guiding current and future revegetation activities toward sustainable ecosystem development and water resources management.

Eurasian dryland ecosystems consist mainly of cropland and grassland, and their changes are driven by both natural factors and human activities. This study utilized the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), gross primary productivity (GPP) and solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) to analyze the changing characteristics of vegetation activity in Eurasia over the past two decades. Additionally, we integrated the mean annual temperature (MAT), the mean annual precipitation (MAP), the soil moisture (SM), the vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and the terrestrial water storage (TWS) to analyze natural factors’ influence on the vegetation activity from 2003 to 2022. Through partial correlation and residual analysis, we quantitatively described the contributions of both natural and human factors to changes in vegetation activity. The results indicated an overall increasing trend in vegetation activity in Eurasia; the growth rates of vegetation greenness, productivity and photosynthetic capacity were 1.00 × 10⁻³ yr⁻¹ (p < 0.01), 1.30 g C m⁻² yr⁻² (p < 0.01) and 1.00 × 10⁻³ Wm⁻²μm⁻¹sr⁻¹yr⁻¹ (p < 0.01), respectively. Furthermore, we found that soil moisture was the most important natural factor influencing vegetation activity. Human activities were identified as the main driving factors of vegetation activity in the Eurasian drylands. The relative contributions of human-induced changes to NDVI, GPP and SIF were 52.45%, 55.81% and 74.18%, respectively. These findings can deepen our understanding of the impacts of current natural change and intensified human activities on dryland vegetation coverage change in Eurasia.