Empirical Analysis of the Low-Carbon and Circular Agriculture Pilot Policies' Impact on Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions Based on DID Model －A Case Study of Zhejiang Province, China

概要

At the 2021 Leaders Summit on Climate, leaders from various countries made their statements and commitments about reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. At the summit president Xi Jinping announced that greenhouse gas emissions by China would be reduced over 60% relative to the level of 2005 by 2050 and reaffirmed its pledges to peak the emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060. In order to better achieve the goals related to energy conservation and reducing GHG emissions in agriculture, Ministry of Agriculture of People’s Republic of China in 2015 made Zhejiang Province the first national low-carbon and circular agriculture pilot province. Specialized policies were conducted in Zhejiang Province for reducing the use of chemical fertilizers in agriculture, improving the efficiency of using chemical fertilizers and pesticides, popularizing low-emission agricultural machinery, and basically realizing the resource utilization of livestock and poultry waste and the harmless treatment of livestock and poultry waste.

　Based on the panel data of the 20 cities in treatment group (Zhejiang Province) and control group (Hubei Province) from 2011 to 2020, the agricultural GHG emission of each city was estimated. In order to overcome the endogenous problem of the sample selection and the exogenous problem of other macroeconomic policies, this research adopted the difference-in-difference model to assess the effect of pilot policy on GHG emission in different cities and analyze the reasons.

　The empirical results showed that after taking into account variables such as income level, rural employment and average power of agricultural machinery, agricultural GHG emissions in Zhejiang Province decreased by an average of 6.681 million tons after 2015, compared with Hubei Province, driven by the Low-Carbon and Circular Agriculture Pilot Policies.

　According to the results of the analysis, the estimated value of the policy treatment effect is negative and the significance level is 1%, indicating that the pilot policy has a significant reduction effect on the agricultural GHG emissions in Zhejiang Province. Specifically, 6.681 million tons of the 8.18 million tons reduction in the average agricultural GHG emissions in Zhejiang Province after 2015 came from the treatment effect of the pilot policy.

　However,the research can only examine the impact of the pilot policy related to agriculture GHG emissions and cannnot assess the specific impact of the policy on farmers during its implementation. And agricultural GHG emissions can be effectively reduced by increasing forced transformation of agricultural system are likely to harm farmers’ interests in the process of policy implementation. With the breakthrough of data and methods, the relevant shortcomings of this research are to be explored in depth by subsequent studies.