Digital technology-enabled agricultural environmental pollution prevention and control: Logical basis, key issues, and path construction

The prevention and control of agricultural environmental pollution are core issues in global ecological environmental protection. Therefore, in this study, we examined the characteristics of agricultural environmental pollution in China, evaluated the status of existing pollution prevention and control measures, and analyzed the logical basis and key issues of digital technology-enabled pollution prevention and control. Additionally, we proposed a path for the widespread implementation of digital technology-enabled prevention and control of agricultural environmental pollution in China. We found that the current agricultural environmental pollution prevention and control work in China has achieved relatively efficient and stable governance results. However, agricultural environmental pollution has not yet been fundamentally curbed, and problems remained, such as the need for greater prevention and control at the source, the deficiencies in the regulatory and standards systems, the weak foundation for pollution monitoring, and the urgent need to strengthen regulatory capacity. Theoretically, digital technology can improve the precision, transparency, and efficiency of agricultural environmental pollution prevention and control. In practice, digital technology innovation has created favorable conditions for leveraging cutting-edge technologies to prevent and control agricultural environmental pollution. Policy enhancement and optimization have provided substantial opportunities for digital technology empowerment, while balancing economic and environmental benefits has provided vast possibilities for the transformation of traditional agriculture. Development of digital technology for the prevention and control of agricultural environmental pollution should focus on improving the quality and efficiency of data collection, strengthening data analysis and model prediction, improving intelligent decision support systems, and balancing the costs and benefits of the technology. Based on these gaps, we outlined a digital technology-enabled agricultural environmental pollution prevention and control path that included improving the policy mechanism of agricultural environmental pollution prevention and control, encouraging producers to reach a consensus on collective action, fostering synergies between multiple social governance bodies, and building a deeply integrated Industry-University-Research innovation consortium.