Abstract: Land is an important resource for local governments to promote urban renewal. The land streamline administration reform is of great significance for the implementation of the new urbanization strategy and the promotion of green and high-quality development of cities. Taking the decentralization of construction land approval authority as the starting point, based on the vegetation cover raster data, the micro data of land transactions, and the characteristic data of prefecture level cities from 2007 to 2019, this paper empirically analyzes the impact and mechanism of the land “decentralization, management, and service”reform on urban green renewal. The findings show that the decentralization of land use approval can significantly reduce urban industrial sulfur dioxide emissions, increase the degree of urban plant coverage, and accelerate urban green renewal. The mechanism test indicates that after the decentralization of approval authority, the number and area of land grants for local high-pollution industries decreased, while the number of land grants for urban green areas and parks increased, thus improving the level of urban green renewal. However, the decentralization of land use approvals has had a greater impact on“visible environmental protection”in urban construction. The extensibility analysis shows that the decentralization of land use approvals has not exacerbated the“land for profit”behavior of local governments. Therefore, in the future we should continuously deepen the reform of land administration, incentivize local governments to optimize their land operating strategies, and realize“both internal and external improvement”in environmental infrastructure construction, so as to promote green urban renewal.

Key words: streamline administration reform of land, urban green renewal, construction land approval authority, land operating strategy