ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1598729
From Burning to Clean: How China's Heating Transition Reduces Pollution and Enhances Land-use Sustainability
Provisionally accepted
- Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
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Agricultural fires have posed significant challenges to environmental governance and the effective cultivation of land in China, prompting the government to implement the Clean Heating Policy (CHP) since 2013 as a key measure to reduce coal consumption and promote energy structure optimization. Moreover, growing land-use pressures-particularly those arising from agricultural intensification and rural energy demand-have further underscored the need for cleaner and more sustainable heating strategies. Using county-level data on PM2.5 concentrations and agricultural fire frequencies, this paper employs a staggered Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach for empirical analysis. The results indicate that the CHP significantly reduces PM2.5 concentrations by 4.8% and lowers agricultural fire occurrences by 17.4%, with the findings remaining robust. Further analysis demonstrates that the air pollution mitigation effect is primarily concentrated within a 50 km radius, while the fire suppression effect extends up to 100 km, especially pronounced in core grainproducing areas and non-resource-based cities. Overall, this study highlights the positive role of the CHP in improving environmental quality, promoting more rational land resource use, and advancing sustainable energy transition.
Keywords: Clean Heating Policy, Air Pollution, Agricultural fires, Land-use sustainability, spillover effects, China
Received: 23 Mar 2025; Accepted: 16 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jiang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xinyang Jiang, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
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