Agricultural Industry Agglomeration and Carbon Emission Intensity: A Systems Perspective on Resilience and Digital Development

Decarbonizing agriculture depends not only on the efficiency of individual production activities but also on coordination among production, processing, and service activities. From a systems perspective, this study treats provincial agriculture as an interconnected industrial system and examines the relationship between agricultural industry agglomeration and agricultural carbon emission intensity. Moving beyond conventional measures of production concentration, agricultural industry agglomeration is measured as coordination between horizontal agglomeration in agricultural production and vertical agglomeration across production, processing, and agricultural services. Based on a balanced panel of 390 observations across 30 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2023, the study uses province and year fixed effects, mediation and moderation analyses, robustness checks, and an endogeneity check. Results show that agricultural industry agglomeration is significantly associated with lower agricultural carbon emission intensity. The mediation results are consistent with a partial intermediary role for agricultural industry resilience in this relationship. The interaction and simple slope results show that the positive association between agricultural industry agglomeration and agricultural industry resilience is larger at higher levels of digital village development. These findings connect subsystem coordination, adaptive capacity, digital conditions, and carbon performance, thereby extending research on agricultural transformation toward lower carbon intensity from a systems perspective.