As the climate crisis intensifies, the importance of carbon mitigation policies has become increasingly prominent. Rural regions, serving as one of China’s major carbon emission sources, are poised to become key focus regions for emission reduction. However, significant disparities in rural development levels and carbon emissions across China’s regions necessitate tailored energy sustainability and carbon mitigation strategies. Notably, advanced and emerging/developing nations exhibit substantial differences in research priorities and practical pathways, offering multifaceted insights for China’s rural carbon emission research. Adopting a hybrid bibliometric and narrative approach, the study retrieves data from the Web of Science, applies CiteSpace for bibliometric visualization, and synthesizes thematic developments in the international literature through a narrative analysis, with a discussion of the implications for China. The findings reveal distinct trajectories: over the past 25 years, advanced countries have shifted their research focus from air quality improvement to low-carbon mitigation, while emerging and developing countries have transitioned from energy demand toward air quality enhancement, with emerging momentum toward low-carbon strategies. By reviewing 95 relevant articles, this study summarizes the differences between the two in terms of their main lines of research. Building on these differences, this study proposes targeted research priorities for advanced and emerging/developing regions of China.

Urban forest fragmentation can weaken ecological connectivity and reduce the spatial continuity of cooling benefits, highlighting the need for structure-function integrated planning. Using 2020 as the baseline year, this study combined the Markov Chain-Future Land Use Simulation model, Morphological Spatial Pattern Analysis, the Minimum Cumulative Resistance model, and Kernel Density Estimation to simulate the evolution of Hangzhou’s forest-dominated ecological network under Business-as-Usual, Economic Development, and Ecological Conservation scenarios for 2030. A Random Forest model with Shapley Additive Explanations was further used to quantify the nonlinear relationship between landscape spatial context and land surface temperature. The results show that the Economic Development and Business-as-Usual scenarios intensify forest fragmentation and weaken the structural integrity of potential ecological corridors, whereas the Ecological Conservation scenario improves network stability through patch amalgamation, core area expansion, and reduced breakpoint density. Land surface temperature was strongly associated with built-up land adjacency. Built-up areas near forest patches showed a maximum relative cooling benefit of 8.04 degrees Celsius, and corridor cooling effects were most pronounced within 300 m, remaining detectable up to about 900 m under the Ecological Conservation scenario. These findings support structure-oriented planning for urban forest conservation and heat mitigation.

With increasing global efforts to increase the quality of rural spaces, traditional planning models, which emphasise engineering-related and economic considerations, are no longer able to fully meet the public’s diverse aesthetic demands. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce an aesthetic perspective to conduct research on evaluation of and planning strategies for rural spaces. Taking Dongqiao Town in Fuyang District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province, China, as a case study, this study constructed a comprehensive evaluation system that integrated indicators related to aesthetic subjects (demand, perception, satisfaction) with those related to aesthetic objects (richness, aggregation, radiation). Point of interest data collection, Geographic Information System spatial analysis, questionnaire surveys, and interviews were used to analyse and compare the characteristics of 11 administrative villages in Dongqiao Town in terms of aesthetic resources, spatial structure, and transportation accessibility. In addition, the study examined the mechanism of the interaction between aesthetic subjects and objects and its impact on the survival and construction of the focal spaces. The results showed that core regions such as Dongqiao Village, Xiande Village, and Sanxi Village stood out in terms of aesthetic resources and transportation advantages, while more remote villages faced challenges such as a lack of aesthetic elements and poor accessibility. In response to these characteristics and shortcomings, the research proposed optimisation strategies such as differentiated and zoned construction and the participation of multiple entities in dynamic evaluation and regulation, providing theoretical support and practical guidance for improving the quality of rural spaces, strengthening regional culture, and achieving sustainable development.