Mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions in China’s agricultural sector: Current status and future perspectives

Reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in China’s agricultural sector is essential to achieving carbon neutrality by 2060. China has been promoting the green transformation of its agricultural sector. This study systematically reviewed the policies and researches that are related to the reduction of GHG emissions in China’s agricultural sector, and established a governance framework for guiding future research that focuses on emission reduction in agriculture. Our results showed that China’s agriculture-related policies have already covered the main aspects of GHG emission reduction and carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector; however, technological innovation and resource use efficiency improvements should be further endorsed along with explicit policy targets. Among the existing literature, researches have focused on the estimation of agricultural GHG emissions to impact the evaluation of specific policies and measures. Future research on the improvement of agricultural GHG emission accounting and integrated assessment of emission reduction measures is needed. A governance framework for mitigating GHG emissions in agriculture has been identified in China, in which the government, market, and social organizations are the main governance entities, and the farmers are the implementation entities. Hence, to encourage farmers to reduce GHG emissions, the interactions between governmental entities and implementation entities should be considered when designing effective policies. This study summarized the current status of policies and research that are related to the mitigation of China’s agricultural GHG emissions and provided future perspectives on policy design and research foci.