With the improvement of residents’ income and the upgrading of consumption structure, the demand for livestock and poultry products in China has grown rapidly, but the environmental pressure brought by animal husbandry has become increasingly prominent. Data shows that non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gases generated by animal husbandry and water pollutants caused by manure have become important factors exacerbating climate change and endangering environmental health. How to achieve the synergistic control of livestock carbon emissions and environmental pollution (SCLCP) while ensuring the supply of livestock and poultry products has become a key issue for the green development of agriculture. Against this background, the rise of the digital economy has provided new ideas for solving this contradiction—can the rural digital economy effectively promote the synergistic governance of carbon emissions and pollution in animal husbandry?
A research team led by Professor Minjuan Zhao from the College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, conducted a systematic study based on China's provincial panel data from 2011 to 2021. Focusing on the relationship between the rural digital economy and the environmental performance of animal husbandry, the study revealed the synergistic effect of the digital economy on livestock carbon emission reduction and pollution control through empirical analysis, and deeply analyzed its internal mechanism and regional heterogeneity, providing a new perspective for the green transformation of animal husbandry. The relevant research has been published in Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2025649).
The study found that the rural digital economy significantly promotes the synergistic control of livestock carbon emissions and pollution, and this conclusion has been verified through various robustness tests such as the instrumental variable method. Its core mechanism of action is reflected in three aspects: first, green technology progress is a key driving force. The in-depth integration of digital technology with livestock and poultry breeding promotes the intelligent upgrading of precise feeding, environmental control, waste management and other links, improving resource utilization efficiency; second, the digital economy alleviates information asymmetry, optimizes the allocation of production factors, improves resource allocation efficiency, and reduces environmental redundancy caused by resource waste or scarcity; in addition, digital technology promotes production agglomeration, forms large-scale breeding models, promotes the sharing of pollution control facilities, and reduces carbon emissions and pollution intensity per unit of output.
Notably, policy and market factors have a significant moderating effect on this effect. The study shows that government support can significantly amplify the effect of the rural digital economy on the synergistic governance of carbon emissions and pollution in agricultural zones and agropastoral transitional zones, while the level of marketization weakens this positive impact in agricultural zones. This means that in major agricultural production areas and agropastoral transitional zones, increasing financial investment in rural digital infrastructure and green technologies can better give play to the guiding role of policies; while in regions with a high degree of marketization, it is necessary to guard against the relaxation of environmental standards that may be caused by market profit-seeking, and strengthen the coordination between supervision and market mechanisms.
From a spatial perspective, the rural digital economy also shows a significant spatial spillover effect. The development of the local digital economy not only reduces its own livestock carbon intensity, but also reduces carbon emissions in neighboring areas through technological diffusion, policy imitation and other channels, but its impact on the pollution intensity of surrounding areas is not significant for the time being. This finding provides a basis for cross-regional synergistic governance, suggesting that it is necessary to establish a regional linkage mechanism to promote the cross-regional sharing of digital technologies and environmental policies.
This study fills the research gap of the digital economy in the field of animal husbandry environmental governance, constructs an index system for the development of the rural digital economy for the first time, and systematically explains its internal logic of achieving synergistic control of carbon emissions and pollution through three paths: technology, resources and space. The research results provide scientific reference for formulating differentiated policies: on the one hand, we should accelerate the construction of rural digital infrastructure, promote intelligent breeding technologies, and improve the digitalization level of animal husbandry; on the other hand, it is necessary to optimize policy tools according to the characteristics of different regions, strengthen government support in agricultural zones and agropastoral transitional zones, balance economic development and environmental regulation in regions with a high degree of marketization, and promote the transformation of animal husbandry towards green and low-carbon development.
DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2025649