Carbon reduction effect of comprehensive land consolidation and its configuration paths at the township level: A case study of Zhejiang Province, China

Changing land use is one of the main factors influencing global climate change and the imbalance in the carbon cycle. Consequently, the focus of international organizations and the academic community is on strategies to mitigate carbon emissions or improve carbon sequestration by optimizing land use structure and function. Since 2019, China's Zhejiang Province has implemented a township-level pilot policy, exploring a comprehensive land consolidation (CLC for short) pilot policy that includes all elements of "mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, and grasslands." This project aimed to increase the efficiency of land use while at the same time fully exploiting the carbon storage potential. However, there is a notable lack of knowledge about the feasibility of the CLC pilot policy to reduce carbon emissions, as well as the specific configuration conditions required for its success. This study examines data from 704 townships in Zhejiang Province, China, spanning the period from 2015 to 2022, innovatively constructs an explanatory framework for the interaction between the peripheral "society-economy-ecology" system and the core "human-land-industry" system. On this basis, employing Double/Debiased Machine Learning (DML) and Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), this study uncovers the impacts of the CLC pilot policy on carbon emissions and its configuration paths. The results show that: (1) The CLC pilot policy has a significant negative impact on carbon emissions. Implementing the CLC pilot policy leads to an average reduction of 1.850 tons per capita carbon emissions in the pilot townships. This conclusion remains robust even after conducting tests for robustness, endogeneity, and placebo effects. (2) The configuration paths for achieving high-efficiency carbon emission reduction through the CLC pilot policy mainly include four modes: ecological restoration, periphery-driven, aggregation and enhancement, and characteristic protection. (3) A single "economy" factor alone is not enough to drive the reduction of carbon emissions. This study provides a theoretical research perspective and practical reference for the CLC pilot policy targeting the Chinese government's "dual carbon" goals and provides empirical support for policy formulation.