Introduction The optimized utilization of land resources is a crucial foundation for maintaining national ecological security and ensuring sustainable development. Currently, China’s agriculture is facing the severe challenge of both land fragmentation and ecological carrying capacity pressure, which not only hinders the process of agricultural modernization but also poses potential threats to food security and ecological security. In this context, green finance, as a strategic tool for promoting land intensive utilization and green transformation, helps to promote the formation of a large-scale and stable land utilization model, thereby enhancing the overall capacity of national ecological security guarantee. Methods This study uses panel data from 30 provinces in China as the research sample, with a time span from 2010 to 2022. By employing the fixed effect model and the mediation model, it not only explores the promoting effect of green finance on land transfer, but also assesses the mediating roles of technological innovation level and farmers’ comprehensive quality in the baseline regression. Results The empirical results show that green finance has significantly promoted land transfer. The effect is most significant in the eastern region, followed by the central region, while there is no statistically significant effect in the western region. Moreover, the technological innovation level and the farmers’ comprehensive quality have enhanced the positive effect of green finance on land transfer, demonstrating that technological innovation and the farmers’ comprehensive quality play an important mediating role in the impact of green finance on land transfer. Discussion This study takes the impact of green finance on land transfer as the entry point, aiming to explore feasible paths for ensuring national ecological security by optimizing land resource allocation. It not only deepens the theoretical mechanism research on green finance in promoting the large-scale utilization of land, but also provides empirical support based on provincial panel data. On this basis, it proposes operational policy suggestions covering the construction of green financial infrastructure and cross-departmental collaborative mechanisms, the establishment of an ecological value assessment system, and the targeted cultivation of professional talents, providing academic support with both theoretical basis and practical reference for enhancing the sustainable utilization of land resources and strengthening the national ecological security barrier.
Ni et al. (Wed,) studied this question.