From Regional Practices to Sustainable Development: A Review of Green and Low-Carbon Rural Construction in China’s Yangtze River Delta

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:GX researchers can use the identified research trajectories and framework to contextualize rural carbon studies.

🏢実務担当者:Corporate sustainability teams can learn from the integration of low-carbon technologies in rural construction for supply-chain decarbonization.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers can draw on the 'YRD solution' as a template for rural green transition policies.

With the intensifying global climate change and the full implementation of China’s “dual-carbon” strategy, the green and low-carbon transition in rural areas has become a core issue in urban and rural construction. As China’s most economically developed and highly urbanized region, the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) holds typical demonstrative significance in the research and practice of green and low-carbon rural construction. This study retrieves 4166 core documents from the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Web of Science (WoS), and Scopus published between 1997 and 2025 to perform multi-database bibliometric analysis and knowledge mapping analysis. CiteSpace and VOSviewer are employed to conduct a comparative analysis of domestic and international literature and to delineate the knowledge evolutionary trends, core research hotspots, and research trajectories in this field. The findings reveal that the research on green and low-carbon rural construction in the YRD has experienced three stages. The first stage involves the introduction of foundational low-carbon concepts, the second stage centers around green transition and policy response, and the third stage is driven by the national rural revitalization and “dual-carbon” strategies. Moreover, five principal research directions have been determined, including spatial planning based on “low-carbon control units”, excavation of green wisdom from traditional villages, discussion of passive green strategies, retrofitting of existing rural residences and integration of low-carbon technologies, and precision rural construction based on industry–space synergy. Consequently, by constructing a dual-thread evolutionary framework integrating the natural ecosystem with the social system, this study systematically extracts the theoretical contributions, paradigm characteristics, and transferable empirical models from the research on green and low-carbon rural construction in the YRD, and proposes a future agenda to facilitate the shift in research paradigm from “problem solving” to “forward planning”. Ultimately, this study aims to offer a demonstrative “YRD solution” for the sustainable development of rural areas in China and beyond.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3390/land15071266first seen 2026-07-16 05:19:09