Climate risk, land use degree, and agricultural digitalization

Global climate systems are changing profoundly and extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. Enhancing the climate adaptation of agricultural systems is now a core issue for national food security. Combining the climate risk with the trend of agricultural digitalization is an important measure to actively address climate change and ensure agricultural security. Based on a panel data of 31 provinces from 2012 to 2020 in China, this paper conducts the entropy method to measure the levels of agricultural digitalization and agricultural greening, employs panel regression models and moderating effect models to explore the non-linear links between climate risk, land use degree, and agricultural digitalization. The empirical results indicate that climate risk significantly inhibits agricultural digitalization. This negative impact exhibits strong destructive and investment-crowding characteristics under extreme rainfall and drought. Land use degree plays a significant staged moderating role in this process. In regions with low land use degree, increasing land development intensity can stimulate digital transformation potential. Furthermore, a significant complementary synergy dividend exists between agricultural digitalization and agricultural greening. Promoting both can directly increase agricultural output. In regions with high climate risk, this three-way synergy makes a larger marginal contribution to resisting output losses. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the inhibition from climate risk is more pronounced in coastal provinces and high agricultural digitalization regions. The findings suggest that climate risk poses a challenge to agricultural digitalization but land use degree and agricultural digitalization can help mitigate these negative impacts. Local governments should optimize land use layouts and promote the coordinated transformation of agricultural digitalization and agricultural greening. Building a high-resilience digital infrastructure system is also essential to enhance agricultural climate adaptation. © 2026 He, Li and Zhai. This is an
open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).