Developing a model of propagating the straw burning prohibition policy in Chinese rural communities and exploring its countermeasures

In this paper, the annual output and the amount of burning of six major crop straws from 2009 to 2019 in China were calculated. Through the estimation, the annual average CO2 emission from crop straw open burning in China had exceeded 220 million tons. Policy propagation modeling was conducted to determine the policy adoption rate of Chinese farmers towards straw burning prohibition. By applying the Logistic and Bass diffusion models, the predictive functions of adoption rate of straw burning prohibition policy were proposed according to the historical data of policy adoption rate for straw burning prohibition since 2000. A novel propagation model of straw burning prohibition policy in Chinese rural communities was established, and the adoption rate of straw burning prohibition policy by 2025 was predicted as 89.19%. Based on the analysis of the national policy and regulation and the discourse tenor of policy propagation for straw burning prohibition, the countermeasures of straw burning prohibition were discussed, which could be beneficial to the policy implementation in China. Therefore, the present work indicates a research direction of predicting the adoption rate of straw burning prohibition policy by farmers through modeling the policy propagation in Chinese rural communities.