The Yellow River Basin (YRB), a typical river system facing the challenge of balancing ecological conservation and economic development, offers valuable insights for global sustainable watershed governance through its forestry green transformation. Based on panel data from nine provinces in the basin from 2005 to 2022, this study constructs an efficiency evaluation indicator system for forestry green development. This system incorporates four inputs (labor, land, capital, and energy), two desirable outputs (economic and ecological benefits), and three undesirable outputs (wastewater, waste gas, and solid waste). By systematically integrating the undesirable outputs-based super-SBM model and the global Malmquist–Luenberger (GML) index, this study provides an assessment from both static and dynamic perspectives. The findings are as follows. (1) Forestry green development efficiency showed fluctuations over the study period, with the basin-wide average remaining below the production frontier. Spatially, it exhibits a pattern of “downstream > upstream > midstream”. (2) The average GML index is 0.984 during the study period, representing an average annual decline in forestry green total factor productivity of 1.6%. The growth dynamics transitioned from a stage dominated solely by technological progress to a dual-driver model involving both technological progress and technical efficiency. (3) The drivers of forestry green total factor productivity growth in the basin show profound regional heterogeneity. The downstream region demonstrates a synergistic dual-driver model of technical efficiency and technological progress, the midstream region is trapped in “dual stagnation” of both technical efficiency and technological progress, and the upstream region differentiates into four distinct pathways: technology-driven yet foundationally weak, efficiency-improving yet technology-lagged, endowment-advantaged yet transformation-constrained, and condition-constrained with efficiency limitations. The assessment framework and empirical findings established in this study can provide empirical evidence and policy insights for basins worldwide to resolve the ecological-development dilemma and promote forestry green transformation.

Property-rights confirmation and registration are widely regarded as an institutional foundation for ecological-product value realization, yet the dynamic mechanism through which registration clarity affects multi-actor cooperation remains insufficiently understood. Using the Yunhe Terraced Fields National Wetland Park in Zhejiang Province as a case, this study develops a tripartite evolutionary-game model involving the local government, farmers, and tourism enterprises. The model incorporates registration clarity into the payoff structure through transaction-cost reduction, compensation realization, and regulatory constraint channels. Parameters are calibrated using gross ecosystem product (GEP) accounting, policy documents, administrative records, and field survey data. Numerical simulations show that clearer registration expands the basin of attraction of cooperative equilibrium and accelerates convergence under the calibrated parameter setting. Government incentives serve as an important external trigger, enterprise participation depends on a feasible balance between cost-sharing and expected returns, and farmers’ ecological protection is crucial for maintaining long-term cooperative stability. The study contributes by transforming registration clarity from a descriptive institutional background into a scenario-based institutional-intensity variable within an evolutionary-game framework. The findings should be interpreted as calibrated simulation evidence rather than direct causal estimates, and they suggest an integrated institutional path linking registration, compensation, transaction-cost reduction, and regulation.

Amid China’s pursuit of ecological civilization and high-quality development, a central policy challenge lies in designing environmental governance instruments that can simultaneously deliver ecological improvement and socially inclusive outcomes. Using the National Forest City (NFC) program as a representative urban ecological governance initiative, this study examines the relationship between place-based environmental certification and urban inclusive green growth (IGG) in China. Drawing on panel data from 290 prefecture-level cities over the 2000–2023 period, this study exploits the staggered rollout of the NFC program and estimates its relationship with urban inclusive green growth using a multi-period difference-in-differences framework. The results show that NFC designation is associated with a statistically significant increase in cities’ IGG performance, and this relationship remains robust across a series of alternative specifications and placebo tests. Dimension-specific estimates further show significant positive associations with economic performance, social equity, and environmental quality. Further analyses reveal pronounced heterogeneity in the estimated relationship. The positive association between NFC designation and inclusive green growth is stronger in non-resource-based cities, cities located in southern China, and core urban areas, suggesting that local development conditions and structural constraints play an important role in shaping the observed relationship. Employment-related analysis provides evidence consistent with broader city-level employment expansion as one potential pathway associated with the NFC–IGG relationship. Moreover, the positive association between NFC designation and IGG is stronger in cities with greater population mobility and where local governments place greater emphasis on innovation, underscoring the importance of complementary institutional and demographic conditions. By explicitly linking ecological governance, labor-market outcomes, and inclusive growth, this study contributes to the policy-oriented literature on urban sustainability. The findings suggest that environmental certification programs such as the NFC may provide a governance framework for connecting ecological objectives with inclusive development goals. Beyond the Chinese context, the results offer transferable insights for cities seeking to design environmental governance strategies that move beyond symbolic greening toward more integrated and socially inclusive sustainability transitions.

The realization of ecological product value is an important issue in advancing ecological civilization and modernizing natural resource governance. Natural resource ownership registration clarifies resource boundaries, rights holders, and responsibility relationships, thereby laying a property rights foundation for the identification, accounting, transaction, and distribution of ecological product value. However, as a necessary condition, ownership registration does not automatically lead to value realization. Drawing on property rights theory, externality theory, social-ecological systems theory, transaction cost theory, and collaborative governance theory, this paper constructs an analytical framework of "property rights foundation-spatial coupling-rights extension-actor collaboration-value realization" to examine the key constraints and optimization paths through which registration outcomes are transformed into the capacity for ecological product value realization. The results show that natural resource ownership registration provides a property rights foundation for ecological product value realization, but the release of its institutional effects is still constrained by boundary mismatch and interface disconnection. The former refers to the scale mismatch among property rights boundaries, ecological functional boundaries, beneficiary boundaries, and responsibility boundaries, which makes it difficult to identify ecological contributions, define beneficiaries, and allocate compensation responsibilities. The latter refers to the lack of stable linkages between registration outcomes and value accounting, ecological rights expression, market transactions, green finance, and benefit distribution mechanisms, resulting in difficulties in verifying ecological value, expressing rights, completing transactions, and sharing benefits. Accordingly, future efforts should focus on boundary linkage, chain integration, and systemic coordination by establishing a linkage mechanism among "ownership units-ecological function units-benefit-responsibility units", promoting the integration of "registration-accounting-verification-transaction-distribution", strengthening digital governance and institutional coordination, and transforming natural resource ownership registration from a static property rights confirmation tool into a dynamic governance foundation for ecological product value realization.

This paper investigates the adoption strategies of blockchain technology within the framework of a dual-channel supply chain. Applying game theory, we demonstrate that the adoption decision of supply chain members depends on consumer privacy concern. Furthermore, we derive an equilibrium in which one chain member adopts blockchain technology while the other does not, depending on consumer acceptance of the online channel and transportation costs. Additionally, we identify an equilibrium where both chain members adopt blockchain technology, which may lead to either a win–win or a win–lose outcome for the manufacturer and retailer, respectively. Our findings also suggest that consumer surplus increases as consumer privacy concern grows. Moreover, three extensions analytically confirm the robustness of our results.