Reducing agricultural nitrous oxide emissions in China: the role of food production, forest cover, income, trade openness, and rural population.

In the light of China's carbon-neutral goal, this study examines how food production, forest cover, trade openness, and rural population contribute to the quest of addressing China's agricultural nitrous oxide emissions. Time series data ranging from 1971 to 2018 was used for analysis in this study. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) technique was employed to evaluate potential cointegration as well as to ascertain the long and short-run effects of food production, forest cover, income, trade openness, and rural population on agricultural nitrous oxide emission. The Toda-Yamomoto causality analysis was also used to identify the causal relations between covariates (food production, forest cover, income, trade openness, and rural population) and the outcome variable (agricultural nitrous oxide emission). The long-run evidence is that rural population in itself tends to increase agricultural nitrous oxide emissions likewise food production. There is also validation of the existence of environmental Kuznets curve for agricultural nitrous oxide emissions. Moreover, income interacts with rural population to reduce agricultural nitrous oxide emissions in the long-run. Causality analysis indicated rural population affects the level of forest cover; forest cover is found to cause agricultural nitrous oxide emissions but the converse is not established, and income as well as the interaction between income and rural population determines agricultural nitrous oxide emissions. The short-run dynamics results establish an oscillatory equilibrium convergence for agricultural nitrous oxide emissions in event of structural disturbances. From the findings, the EKC hypothesis is relevant by offering avenue to reduce emission. Thus, income growth remains helpful in addressing nitrous oxide emission from the agricultural sector. However, research is needed to unravel why nitrous oxide tends to increase in many forest areas. Since food production cannot be halted, policy makers need to enhance the uptake of efficient food production technologies including developing and using more renewable energy for food production. It is important for authorities to attend to rural development in order to mitigate agricultural nitrous oxide emissions in China.