Can digital agriculture development drive agricultural low-carbon transition? Evidence from China

Agriculture faces the dual challenges of climate change mitigation and food security, and reducing agricultural carbon-emission intensity has become an important pathway toward a low-carbon agricultural transformation. Against the backdrop of rapid digitalization in rural areas, whether digital agriculture development can effectively reduce agricultural carbon emission intensity remains an important empirical question. Using panel data for 30 provincial-level regions in China from 2012 to 2023, this study constructs a Digital Agriculture Development Index from three dimensions: digital human capital and application capacity, digital infrastructure and production conditions, and digital industry and service environment. Agricultural carbon emission intensity is measured based on carbon emissions from major crop production inputs and operations. The results show that digital agriculture development significantly reduces agricultural carbon emission intensity, and this finding remains robust after a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. Mechanism analysis indicates that digital agriculture development is significantly and negatively associated with capital misallocation, while capital misallocation is significantly and positively associated with agricultural carbon emission intensity. For labor and land misallocation, the two estimated relationships are not both statistically significant. Spatial econometric results indicate a significant spatial association between digital agriculture development and agricultural carbon emission intensity. In the heterogeneity analysis, the digital-agriculture coefficient is significantly negative in major grain-producing areas and eastern China and statistically insignificant in non-major grain-producing areas and central and western China. Improvements in capital allocation may partly explain how digital agriculture supports the low-carbon transition of agriculture. The findings offer policy implications for advancing green agricultural development in emerging economies.