Reducing agricultural nitrogen use: A price endogenous partial equilibrium analysis in the Yangtze River Basin, China

Abstract

The overuse of nitrogen fertilizers in agricultural production in China, resulting in negative impacts on the environment, has become a serious issue. Thus, reducing agricultural nitrogen use has become one of the top priorities for achieving the sustainable development goals of the Chinese agricultural sector. Searching for effective approaches to reduce nitrogen use is essential to agricultural and environmental sustainability. In this study, we selected the Yangtze River Basin as the research area, owing to its critical role in Chinese agricultural production, and established a price endogenous partial equilibrium model to simulate the effect of nitrogen use reduction from nitrogen use optimization (NUO) and nitrogen use efficiency improvement (NUE+). Based on agricultural datasets in 2019, simulation results revealed that 1) NUO helped reduce nitrogen use and nitrogen loss by 6.99% and 7.50%, respectively; if changes in the acreage are considered, then the reduction effect will be less significant; 2) nitrogen use decreased continuously with NUE+, and the reduction rate was 7.85%, 15.38%, 22.65%, and 28.02% under the NUE+10%, NUE+20%, NUE+30%, and NUE+40% scenarios, respectively, and nitrogen loss was highly sensitive; and 3) the crop heterogeneity indicated that cereals are regarded as nitrogen-overuse crops and more sensitive to nitrogen use reduction under the NUE+ scenarios than oil crops. Accordingly, in this study, we suggested that practical NUO and NUE+ policies and incentives are necessary, and flexible adjustment strategies for crop-planting structures, such as enlarging the acreage for cereals, may be useful in reducing nitrogen use in the Yangtze River Basin.