The Chinese government has clearly proposed advancing people-centered new-type urbanization, actively and steadily promoting carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, and accelerating the construction of a clean energy system. New-type urbanization will inevitably affect the process of rural carbon emission reduction through the flow and reorganization of production factors such as capital, labor, technology, land, and public services. Compared with the rural carbon emission system, which includes agricultural production and rural residents’ living emissions, the new-type urbanization system covers five dimensions: economic, ecological, social, population, and spatial. The impacts of these urbanization dimensions on rural carbon emissions often differ. However, whether the changes brought by new-type urbanization promote or suppress rural carbon emissions still lacks clear theoretical explanation and reliable scientific conclusions, making it difficult to provide targeted policy guidance for coordinated urban–rural development.
Recently, the team led by Wenxin Liu at the College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, published a research paper titled “Will new-type urbanization restrain carbon emissions in rural China?” in ENGINEERING Agriculture, an ENGINEERING cluster journal of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2026685). The study pointed out three shortcomings in existing literature: (1) carbon emissions from agricultural production are often examined in isolation, ignoring the continuous growth of energy consumption by rural residents, leading to inaccurate conclusions; (2) most existing studies measure urbanization using a single indicator such as land or population from a quantitative dimension, largely neglecting the quality-centered development requirements of new-type urbanization in economic, ecological, and social dimensions; and (3) insufficient attention has been paid to the interactive relationship between new-type urbanization and agricultural carbon emissions, with the moderating role of clean energy generally overlooked.
To address these issues, the research team used rural panel data from 30 provinces in China from 2000 to 2021 to construct a new-type urbanization evaluation system covering five dimensions—economic, ecological, social, population, and spatial—with a total of 32 indicators, and used principal component analysis for weight assignment. Rural carbon emissions were measured from two perspectives: agricultural production and rural residents’ living. Agricultural production carbon emissions covered four carbon sources: agricultural inputs, soil N₂O, rice cultivation, and livestock farming; living carbon emissions covered four energy types: coal, petroleum, natural gas, and electricity. Empirical analysis was conducted using a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model and a spatial Durbin model.
The results showed that China’s rural carbon emissions increased year by year from 2000 to 2021, rising from 280 to 361 Mt, an increase of 28.9%, with an average annual growth rate of 1.3%. Among these, rural residents’ living carbon emissions increased from 45 to 104 Mt, an increase of 131%, with an average annual growth rate of 6.0%, significantly exceeding the growth rate of agricultural production carbon emissions during the same period.
By region, the Northeast region had the largest increase in rural carbon emissions (68.4%), while the Eastern region had the smallest increase (18.0%). The full-sample regression results showed that the regression coefficients of new-type urbanization on total rural carbon emissions, agricultural production carbon emissions, and rural residents’ living carbon emissions were −0.8464, −0.7507, and −0.0834, respectively, all significantly negative at least at the 5% level. Spatial effect decomposition further indicated that new-type urbanization had a significant inhibitory effect on local agricultural production carbon emissions (direct effect coefficient −0.095, P < 0.01), but its direct effect on local residents’ living carbon emissions was significantly positive (0.061, P < 0.05), and it also produced a positive spillover effect on residents’ living carbon emissions in neighboring areas (indirect effect coefficient 0.271, P < 0.01). The moderating effect of clean energy showed significant regional heterogeneity: at the national level, clean energy as a moderating variable weakened the negative inhibitory effect of new-type urbanization on rural carbon emissions (interaction term coefficient 0.011, P < 0.01); in the Eastern and Western regions, clean energy weakened the positive driving effect of new-type urbanization on rural carbon emissions; while in the Northeast region, clean energy weakened the negative inhibitory effect of new-type urbanization on rural carbon emissions. The reason is that from 2000 to 2021, the share of clean energy power generation only rose from 25% to 35%, and its moderating potential has not yet been fully released.
The marginal contributions of this study are as follows: it scientifically measured rural carbon emissions from the dual perspectives of agricultural production and rural residents’ living, addressing the limitations of prior studies that focused exclusively on either production- or household-level emissions; it constructed a five-dimensional new-type urbanization evaluation indicator system, overcoming the limitations of single population or land indicators; and it was the first to incorporate clean energy as a moderating variable into the analytical framework, revealing its complex moderating mechanism in the relationship between new-type urbanization and rural carbon emissions. The study pointed out that under the strategic framework of ecological civilization, deepening the application of clean energy should be taken as a key measure to promote rural green development and low-carbon production, while differentiated development strategies should be implemented according to the heterogeneous characteristics of urbanization in different regions, so as to achieve multiple policy objectives of rural carbon emission reduction, energy saving, and pollutant reduction.
DOI:10.15302/J-FASE-2026685