Climate Change and Agricultural Sustainability: Lessons from China

Climate change poses a growing threat to global agricultural systems, with developing economies like China facing unique challenges in balancing food security, environmental protection, and economic growth. This study examines the interplay between climate risk, fiscal environmental protection expenditures, and agricultural sustainability across 31 Chinese provinces from 2012 to 2022. Utilizing panel data analysis and a moderating effect regression model, the research quantifies the heterogeneous impacts of climate risk on agricultural sustainability, revealing a significant negative correlation in provinces with lower baseline levels of sustainable development. Conversely, the effect diminishes in regions with higher sustainability performance. A critical counterintuitive finding is that fiscal environmental protection expenditures, intended to mitigate environmental degradation, inadvertently exacerbate the adverse effects of climate risk on agricultural sustainability, suggesting potential misalignment in policy implementation. These results underscore the necessity for regionally differentiated strategies that integrate both climate adaptation and mitigation measures with sustainable agricultural practices. The study contributes to the discourse on climate-agriculture policy by highlighting China’s empirical lessons, which offer scalable insights for developing nations and analogous economies grappling with similar trade-offs between environmental governance and agricultural resilience. Ultimately, this research advocates for re-evaluating regional and fiscal policy to ensure synergistic outcomes under escalating climate challenges.