Going green on paper and on ground: The impact of government environmental narratives on forest cover

Forests provide critical ecosystem services but face mounting threats from human activities and natural disturbances. Regulatory and economic instruments can promote forest conservation, yet they often incur high political and economic costs. Government narratives offer a more cost-effective alternative. They help overcome collective action dilemmas by integrating diverse actors' cognition and linking individual actions to broader environmental challenges. This study examines how government environmental narratives affect forest cover at the macro level, using large language models and an LDA topic model to construct narrative indicators from provincial party newspaper texts across 31 Chinese provincial administrative regions from 2010 to 2022. Four key findings emerge. First, government environmental narrative exposure significantly increases forest cover. Second, this effect operates through three pathways: enhancing public environmental attention, stimulating green innovation, and expanding green credit provision. Third, topic confusion negatively moderates the relationship between narrative exposure and forest cover. Fourth, the positive effect of narrative exposure is more pronounced in regions with stronger government intervention. This study extends forest governance theory beyond conventional regulatory and economic instruments and advances environmental narrative research from individual to macro-ecological outcomes.