This study examines the impact of agricultural input prices on river water quality in China, using provincial panel data and high-frequency monitoring records for chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia nitrogen (NH₃-N). In our own research, we have collected data from 30 provinces from 2010 to 2020.Employing a two-way fixed effects model, we find significant heterogeneity across input types. Rising fertilizer prices reduce pollution through cost constraints and input substitution, supporting a price-induced reduction effect. Pesticide prices show no statistically significant effect, reflecting their inelastic demand as essential crop protection inputs. In contrast, higher mechanization costs are associated with increased pollution, as they discourage the use of efficient machinery and prompt a return to less precise traditional practices, thereby exacerbating nutrient runoff. These results suggest that price-based policies are not uniformly effective. We therefore propose a three-pronged strategy: reforming fertilizer pricing to curb overuse, providing targeted subsidies for green mechanization to lower adoption barriers, and establishing cross-regional governance frameworks to address spatial spillovers in water quality management.

Climate change threatens progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by exposing their deep interdependencies. This study constructs a causal network model of the SDGs and tests system resilience under five extreme climate stressors: extreme heat, extreme precipitation, drought, tropical cyclones, and wildfires—using sequential node perturbation simulations. Results indicate that the SDG network is densely connected (density, 0.346; clustering coefficient, 0.629) and performs at 0.574 baseline level. Resilience varies sharply across stressors: extreme heat triggers the fastest performance decline—its resilience curve area is 31.4% lower than drought's—indicating high cascading failure risk. Both extreme heat and tropical cyclone cause critical transitions when the first 30% of nodes are removed. Vulnerability analysis across all scenarios consistently identifies SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation) and SDG 13 (Climate Action) as structural hubs—high in betweenness centrality and failure frequency—making them pivotal for system stability. These findings reveal how climate risks amplify systemic vulnerability through SDG interlinkages. The perturbation framework offers a quantitative tool to pinpoint intervention priorities and guide resilience-building governance under climate stress.

The utilization of land cover change is the most core way for human disturbance of regional ecology. Under the rapid urbanization, the extensive development of land has led to problems such as the fragmentation of ecological land, soil erosion, the degradation of biological habitats, and the intensification of ecological risks. However, ecological carrying capacity and ecological sensitivity will in turn restrict the scale and layout of land development. The two form a complex relationship of bidirectional coupling and dynamic feedback. This paper reviews the driving paths of land use on the ecological environment, as well as the multiple constraint mechanisms formed by the ecological environment from natural background, ecological pattern, disaster feedback, and policy control. It also summarizes the three mainstream research hotspots of spatio-temporal evolution, ecological service trade-offs, and multi-factor coupling. And clarify the multi-level mutual feedback laws of natural and human driving factors. The research finds that the existing achievements generally have five major shortcomings. Based on this, it is proposed that future research should focus on areas quantifying ecological security thresholds, enhancing multi-scale analyses, and establishing a long-term monitoring system to better support sustainable land development.

Taking the establishment of national big data comprehensive pilot zones as an exogenous policy shock, this paper examines whether big data policies can constrain corporate earnings management. Based on panel data of China's A-share listed companies from 2000 to 2024, the paper constructs a difference-in-differences model. The estimation results show that after the establishment of pilot zones, the degree of corporate earnings management decreases by about 7.5% on average, and the inhibitory effect of the policy is significant. Group tests further show that non-high-tech enterprises, small-scale enterprises and enterprises with weaker external supervision have more prominent policy responses. This indicates that the improvement of information environment and enhancement of regulatory capacity can form complementary constraints under the condition of relatively weak governance foundations. Relevant findings provide empirical evidence for the institutional optimization of national big data comprehensive pilot zones and the practice of digital governance.

Given the serious ecological problems in the world and the "dual-carbon" goals of China, this paper will empirically study whether and in what way executive green cognition can reduce the traditional "awareness-action gap" to promote enterprises' actual green investment. By taking a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2024, textual analysis will be employed in this paper to quantify executive green cognition, and a time fixed-effects model will be built to examine systematically how it affects corporate green investment and under what boundary conditions this effect occurs. Based on the above analysis, it can be concluded that executives' green cognition is positively correlated with the green investment of enterprises, and this result is consistent in all tests, including lagged variable treatment, alternative variable measurement and the addition of other control variables. Based on the analysis of heterogeneity, it can be found that the promotional effect is relatively weak for heavy-polluting industries and asset-intensive enterprises; thus, external regulatory pressure and asset specificity may be the reasons for this. The goal of this paper is to uncover the "black box" of decision-making at the top management level, put forward a new way of research on the micro-level driving forces for corporate green transformation, and provide a reference for strengthening internal corporate governance and formulating targeted emission reduction policies by the government.

This paper examines the effect of corporate ESG performance on financial risk through the data of Chinese listed companies from 2015 to 2023. Panel data regression and firm-level clustered standard errors were used to show that a high level of ESG performance is associated with a low level of financial risk, and thus good ESG can help to reduce risk. Based on the analysis of ESG sub-indicators, social performance is the most detrimental factor to financial risk; the components of environment and governance are relatively weak and do not have statistical significance. Analysis of heterogeneity shows that the reduction effect of risk for ESG varies based on the level of a company's ESG rating and the industry, being more pronounced in the service sector than in manufacturing. According to the above mechanism analysis, a high ESG performance will help improve the company's operation and increase the trust of all parties involved. Robustness tests were carried out on the alternative risk measure Z-score and stock volatility, as well as on lagged ESG variables, and it was found that the main results remained the same. This paper offers new ideas on the impact of ESG on a company's financial health and can help managers of listed companies take some measures.

Regarding the background of "dual carbon" and high-quality development, it is a hot topic for both academics and industries about corporate green transformation. Based on hierarchical theory, this paper selects Chinese A-share listed companies from 2014-2024 as its research sample, empirically examines the effect of senior executives' green awareness on firms' level of green technological innovation, and further explores the mediating role of ESG performance. The findings show that: (1) senior executives' green awareness exerts a significant positive driving effect on a firm's level of green technological innovation, and this dominant influence remains robust under stability tests conducted with a shorter sample interval. (2) The results of the mediation analysis indicate that ESG performance acts as a crucial 'bridge' between executives' green awareness and the level of corporate green technological innovation; that is, executives' green awareness significantly enhances the firm's substantive green innovation output by optimising its overall performance across environmental, social and governance dimensions. (3) Heterogeneity analysis reveals that polluting firms are more sensitive and responsive to incentives for green innovation than non-polluting firms.

Against the backdrop of accelerating global carbon neutrality and the in-depth advancement of China's "dual carbon" strategy, green finance has been positioned as a core tool to support the green transformation of the economy and society. However, there is still a lack of systematic empirical verification on whether it has achieved truly effective synergy with the low-carbon economy and how efficient the synergy is. Based on panel data of 11 provinces in the Yangtze River Basin from 2014 to 2024, this paper uses the entropy method to measure the development levels of green finance and low-carbon economy in each province, and constructs a coupling coordination degree model to systematically analyze the co-evolution characteristics and regional differentiation patterns of the two. The study finds that both present a spatial pattern of "strong in the lower reaches, average in the middle reaches, and weak in the upper reaches", with completely consistent regional rankings. The coupling coordination degree has evolved from moderate coordination to high coordination, but regional gradient differences are significant and show no sign of narrowing, with a conspicuous gap between the upper and lower reaches. Its improvement is mainly driven by the synchronous growth of the development levels of the two systems themselves. This paper reveals the regional imbalance characteristics and internal driving mechanism of the coordinated development of the two, fills the research gap on the coupling relationship between green finance and low-carbon economy in the Yangtze River Basin, and can provide theoretical basis and decision-making reference for formulating differentiated coordination policies according to local conditions, optimizing cross-regional green finance resource allocation, and bridging the gap of regional coordinated development.

As the global consensus on addressing climate change deepens, traditional fuel-powered racing faces enormous pressure from political incorrectness and public opinion. How do global carbon neutrality regulations and the FIA's new competition rules force traditional automakers and race operators to transition toward electrification through constraint mechanisms? Under the dual influence of the ESG evaluation system and racing budget caps, this study adopts a case study approach to explore the following questions: How does the electrification transition in racing affect teams' commercial sponsorship structure and R&D return on investment? What are the pathways of the "spillover effect" from electric racing technology to mass-produced road cars? Why do electric racing series face commercialization bottlenecks even though they are fully compliant with policy and environmental requirements? This paper finds that policy and economic interests are the fundamental drivers of racing electrification. Policy regulation has broken the rules of traditional fuel-powered racing, reduced R&D costs for road cars, and created real economic returns for automakers. ESG capital has become the decisive factor for electric racing. The era of traditional tobacco and petrochemical sponsorship is over, and tech giants and green funds that comply with ESG norms have successfully taken over the commercial landscape of electric racing through large sponsorships.

Under the background of the "dual carbon" goals and the implementation of the Ecological Environment Code, China's environmental impact assessment (EIA) system is facing a transition from traditional pollution prevention to low-carbon governance. Carbon footprint, as a vital tool for measuring life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, plays a significant role in project-level carbon management. However, current EIA practices have not fully integrated carbon footprint assessment; legal provisions, technical standards, and institutional coordination remain inadequate. Although the Ecological Environment Code explicitly requires GHG emission assessment in EIA, specific rules for carbon footprint evaluation are still pending. This paper reviews the normative status of carbon footprint in China's EIA system, analyzes existing deficiencies and their causes, and draws on international experiences that incorporate climate factors into EIA. It proposes improvement pathways, including clarifying the legal positioning of carbon footprint assessment, refining technical standards, strengthening coordination with carbon management systems, and improving supervisory liability mechanisms. The paper argues that integrating carbon footprint into EIA is a crucial direction for ecological rule of law to respond to the "dual carbon" goals, but this integration should proceed incrementally, based on China's current institutional foundation and practical pilot experiences, to achieve gradual institutionalization and standardization.