Boost or Burden: How Does Green Finance Affect the Dual Security of Food and Ecology?

Abstract

Amid rising population pressure, heightened volatility in international markets, and increasingly binding domestic resource and environmental constraints, safeguarding food security while maintaining ecological security has become a salient policy and academic concern in China. Within this context, our study investigates whether and how green finance contributes to the dual security of food and ecology. Building on a theoretical analytical framework, we elaborate on the functional role of green finance and empirically assess its effects using provincial panel data from China. We construct a composite index to gauge the level of green finance development and then employ a two-way fixed-effects model with province and year fixed effects to identify the overall impact of green finance, followed by a mediation model to uncover the underlying transmission mechanisms and sub-sample regressions to examine heterogeneity. The empirical evidence indicates that, while green finance significantly improves the dual security of food and ecology, substantial heterogeneity is observed, with stronger effects in southern regions, major grain-producing functional areas, and plain regions. Mechanism analyses further show that green finance advances dual security through three primary channels of agricultural structure adjustment, planting specialization, and agricultural green technological innovation, among which shifts in agricultural production structure, greater centralization of planting, and enhanced agricultural green innovation capacity constitute the dominant transmission mechanisms. By integrating food security and ecological security within a unified framework, we clarify the multidimensional pathways through which green finance supports sustainable agricultural development and provide new empirical evidence on how financial instruments can reconcile production and environmental objectives.