Virtual technology has brought new development opportunities to the tourism market and is expected to help the tourism industry cope with the challenges issuing from the COVID-19 pandemic. Given this context, in this study, we propose and test a model based on the SOR architecture, which includes tourists’ experience of virtual tourism, technical readiness (TR), technical acceptance (TA), and tourists’ virtual tourism intentions and the variables of flow experience, technical optimism, technical discomfort, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, adoption intention, and consumption intention. To this end, data were collected through a questionnaire survey of Chinese tourists (n = 542). Then, we used a structural equation model (SEM) to test the hypothetical relationships between potential variables. The results showed that the flow experience delivered by the virtual tourism experience affects tourists’ tendencies to use and intentions to consume virtual tourism. Second, flow experiences can make tourists more optimistic about virtual tourism technology, reduce tourists’ technical discomfort, and enhance tourists’ perceptions of usefulness and ease of use. We also found that tourists’ intentions to use virtual tourism technology affect their intentions to travel on the spot. These findings provide useful insights for tourism practitioners, suggest new ideas for marketing and sustainable development in the virtual tourism industry, and verify the application of the integrated SOR and TAM framework in the field of tourism consumption.

Addressing poverty is one of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. Alleviating relative poverty by stimulating the endogenous motivation of poor people to improve their ability for self-proliferation and diffusion is the focus of attention worldwide. China, as the world’s most populous country, has already left absolute poverty, and the vast rural areas are facing the challenge of managing relative poverty. We use the Delphi method to select three representative cases from the typical cases of rural entrepreneurship published by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and describe the diffusion process and poverty reduction effect of returning farmers’ ‘entrepreneurship’ through the whole process analysis method. We found that the entrepreneurship diffusion model based on returning farmers has a bright future and great potential to improve rural poverty. Using family and local ties and the internet, returning farmers can effectively spread their entrepreneurial experience to other poor households, lowering their entrepreneurial risks and barriers, and thus collectively bringing more farmers out of poverty. The entrepreneurship diffusion of returning farmers can increase farmers’ income, promote the employment and entrepreneurship of poor households and improve the rural ecological environment, thus alleviating the multidimensional poverty of farmers in economic, social and ecological aspects. This provides an experience and reference for developing countries to solve the problems of poverty, especially poverty governance in rural areas. It is worth noting that implementing the diffusion of entrepreneurship among returning farmers requires the support of appropriate policies and the active participation of local governments.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the intricate relationships between human health and the social-ecological system in an era of climate and global change. Widespread COVID-19 adversely affected farmers’ employment, production practices, and livelihood resilience. At the same time, climate change is a key issue limiting agricultural production worldwide. Emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are a major factor leading to global climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural production are receiving increasing attention. Therefore, it is particularly important to develop low-carbon agriculture. Based on data from 920 family farms in Jiangsu province and Shaanxi province, this study constructs a structural equation model and empirically tests the relationship between the variables using the bootstrap method. The results show that: (1) climate change awareness did not directly stimulate farmers’ willingness to pursue low-carbon production; (2) climate change awareness has an impact on low-carbon production willingness through perceived ease of use and consequence awareness; and (3) anti-risk ability can effectively moderate the impact of climate change awareness on low-carbon production behavior in agriculture. The theoretical model framework proposed in this study provides a reference for research in the field of low-carbon agriculture and also provides some insights and suggestions for environmentalists and governments. In addition, policymakers should effectively raise the sense of responsibility of farmers to address climate change and promote low-carbon agricultural production to achieve healthy and sustainable agricultural development.

Rural entrepreneurship is an important way to promote rural revitalization, narrow the gap between urban and rural areas and increase farmers’ income. With the acceleration of urbanization, land resources have become scarcer than capital, technology, and human resources in China. At the same time, food-security pressure makes the stock of rural construction land in China extremely tight. Therefore, how to meet the demand for rural entrepreneurial land without touching the red line of cultivated land or occupying the existing rural construction land available is an urgent problem that needs to be solved. Reviewing the relevant literature, it was found that some regions in China innovated the way of “capital compensation and land equity” to obtain the use rights of marginal land resources such as idle farmhouses, workshops and school buildings and transformed them into entrepreneurial development spaces, which alleviated the scarcity of entrepreneurial construction land. At the same time, it also promoted the local residents’ employment and economic development. We believe that according to the social and economic conditions of different regions, the in-depth tapping of rural marginalized land is an effective way to solve the lack of development space for rural entrepreneurship and should be implemented worldwide.

Under the dual pressure of ensuring global food security and coping with the effects of climate change, many countries have proposed projects of circular agriculture to mitigate the vulnerability of agricultural systems. However, due to the different utilizations of agricultural resources in different countries, there are still some important limitations and obstacles to the promotion of agricultural recycling technologies. This review discusses global circular agriculture projects from a social science perspective. We found that (1) current research on circular agriculture is concentrated in the field of natural sciences with a focus on technological upgrading, neglecting social, political and economic research; (2) top-down circular agriculture projects rely on infrastructure and technical inputs for management, which undermines the focus on public participation and is limited by the timing and intensity of state intervention; (3) the development model led by enterprises or associations relies on cooperation and benefit games with farmers, and its sustainability depends largely on changes in the regulation of the agricultural waste utilization system. Based on this, this review argues that circular agriculture projects are not only technical issues in the field of natural sciences, but also strongly influenced by social development. For future research, we strongly recommend cross-disciplinary cooperation, not limited to technology development.