Innovative incentives can sustainably enhance the achievement of straw burning control in China.

With the raising awareness of environmental protection, straw burning ban has been implemented to control straw burning phenomenon in China. It has received significant achievement by reducing the fire spots remarkably, but fire spots still cannot be eliminated in farmland. Although considerable papers and reviews on straw burning have been conducted, there is still a lack of comprehensive and systematic review of exploring the status, obstacles, implications, and motivations of this phenomenon, especially revealing the unique circumstance and experience in China. The review first summarizes the reasons as well as hazards of straw burning in China, and then explores the dilemma of straw burning ban in terms of farmers' endowments. And then, the review discusses the limitations of subsidy from financial expenditure and suggests two alternative innovative incentives: transferred payment from stakeholders and carbon trading. It is hoped that policy suggestion about straw burning and innovative incentives can enlighten researchers and policymakers who intend to implement straw burning ban effectively in the future.

Sustainable Management of Food Waste during COVID-19 Pandemic: Insights into Irrational Food Hoarding among Chinese Citizens.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, food waste caused by excessive hoarding has accounted a large proportion of the total food waste in urban Chinese households, which indicates that reducing food hoarding has become key to managing household food waste. This study therefore explored the behavioral mechanisms underlying excessive food hoarding among citizens. Based on a sample set of 511 respondents surveyed in Beijing, Hefei, and Guiyang in July 2022, a PLS-SEM model was conducted using SmartPLS 3.0 software to simulate the decision-making process of food hoarding. The following results were found. First, among the households with hoarding, 66.37% had some degree of food waste. Second, hoarding preference was the direct predictor of hoarding behavior, which means that hoarding behavior can be effectively controlled by regulating preferences. Third, group influence including homology consistency and social network support, as well as psychological panic, both enhanced citizens' hoarding preference and induced hoarding behavior. Therefore, it is necessary to weaken group influence and try to help citizens overcome panic. Finally, food supply information release can not only alleviate citizens' psychological panic and weaken group influence, but also block the transformation of preference into behavior. The above results are of great importance for the design of management policies for food waste caused by irrational hoarding during the pandemic.

The influence of smartphone use on conservation agricultural practice: Evidence from the extension of rice-green manure rotation system in China.

Although the impact of smartphone use has aroused widespread public interest, its effect on promoting conservation agriculture has never been revealed. We developed an integrated model to explain the scientific question of how smartphone use influence farmers' behavior of adopting a conservation agricultural practice-rice-green manure rotation system (RGRS). Based on a sample set containing 934 respondents, the causal chain was estimated by using the PLS-SEM with bootstrapping. The results showed that smartphone use directly contributes to farmers' RGRS adoption behavior, which provides new evidence for promoting the popularization of intelligent terminals in rural China. Another finding was that, perceived environmental degradation threats and environmental services of RGRS mediated the relationship between smartphone use and farmers' adoption behavior. This discovery provides us with enlightenment that knowledge related to environmental degradation and environmental services of RGRS can be imported into smartphone Apps commonly used by farmers to increase information exposure, raise environmental awareness and regulate farmer behavior. Besides, smartphone use reduced farmers' satisfaction with governmental support for RGRS, which adversely affected farmers' RGRS adoption behavior. Surprisingly, we found that the use of some traditional media helped to improve farmers' satisfaction. Therefore, policymakers should not ignore the role of traditional media while making use of smartphone-based information tools. These results can help policymakers better understand the contribution of smartphone use to conservation agriculture, and inform the development of supportive policies.

Environmental Behavior Spillover or Public Information Induction: Consumers' Intention to Pay a Premium for Rice Grown with Green Manure as Crop Fertilizer.

Nowadays, there is a growing interest in pro-environmental foods produced by pro-environmental practices. However, consumers' payment motivations towards such foods are currently poorly understood. This manuscript provided a critical investigation of Chinese consumers' intention to pay a premium (ITPP) for rice grown with green manure as crop fertilizer (GMR). One focus was the establishment of an explanatory structural research framework that includes effects of environmental behavior spillover (EBS) and public information induction (PII); another focus was to analyze the impacts of the selected structural elements on ITPP by introducing education as a moderator. Results suggest that consumers' ITPP can be largely influenced by PII, therefore, for GMR marketers and policy makers, measures should be developed to widen consumers' access to public information related to GMR and to improve their capacity of screening effective information. EBS, when ITPP remains low, emerged as a pivotal predictor of consumers' ITPP. This observation provides us with the enlightenment that breeding consumers' daily environmental behaviors is highly valued to inspire their payment intention in the early stages of GMR market development. Another finding is that, with the introduction of the educational variable, the influence coefficients of EBS and PII on ITPP increased from 0.42 and 0.53 to 0.61 and 0.66, respectively, which means that it is possible to boost consumers' payment intention by improving their educational attainment. This study contributes to the existing literature by providing empirical evidence for the GMR industrial upgrading strategy and have significant implications for the environmental governance of the agricultural sector.