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Decreasing vegetation cover leads to serious environmental problems, with negative impacts on human health and socioeconomic development. In recent years, these problems have seriously threatened human societies around the world. Although there have been many studies of urbanization's impacts on natural land cover, ecosystem health, and biodiversity, the effects of spatial variation of human factors and their interaction with climate factors are less well known, particularly in rapidly developing countries such as China. This makes it difficult to design effective ecological restoration policies because the lack of such research creates a high risk of misunderstanding the current situation and wasting a lot of money and labour. To provide some of the missing information, we used municipal-and county-level data from China in 2017 to calculate the contributions of 14 factors that affect vegetation cover, which combine urbanization, socioeconomic development, and natural influences. We found significant regional differences in the impacts of the urbanization and socioeconomic development factors, suggesting that their impact differed among northeastern, southern, and western China, sometimes with opposite effects. This was especially true in western China, where most human factors had negative impacts on vegetation cover. Our research has implications for environmental protection planning in regions affected by environmental degradation in China.

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Energy consumption in the residential sector is increasing rapidly in China. This study applies an integrated assessment model to investigate the adverse impacts of household energy consumption by various fuel types across rural and urban areas on age- and sex- specific premature deaths associated with PM2.5 pollution at provincial levels for 2015. We further estimate the economic and health co-benefits of a switch from solid fuels to electricity within households. We find that energy consumed by Chinese urban households was nearly 1.8 times than that of rural households. However, premature deaths due to household energy usage was 1.1 times higher in rural areas compared to urban areas due to direct use of coal for heating in rural households. The majority of household consumption-related premature deaths are predominately in the Southern area of China due to the population size and aging population. By replacing coal and biomass with electricity, this paper estimates economic benefits equal to 0.09% (95% CI: 0.08%-0.1%) GDP for rural areas and 0.006% (0.005%-0.007%) of GDP for urban areas of China. The results suggest that mitigation measures such as the promotion and subsidization of cleaner fuels, modern stove within rural households would yield these potential significant economic benefits.

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