Analysis of regional differences and spatial and temporal evolution of tourism carbon emissions in China: considering carbon sink effect

The purpose of this study is to analyze the regional differences and spatial-temporal evolutionary characteristics of carbon dioxide emissions of tourism in China during 2001–2022 from the perspective of carbon sink effect by using an econometric modeling approach. The findings show that CO2 emissions from China's tourism industry exhibit non-equilibrium spatial characteristics or non-linear relationships. Secondly, the results of Theil's index show that the intra-regional differences in tourism CO2 emissions are greater than the inter-regional differences and exhibit a gradient of ‘West > Central > East’. Finally, under the condition of considering the existence of spatial regional heterogeneity, it is found that tourism CO2 emissions have significant spatial agglomeration, with high CO2 emission regions primarily clustered within the eastern region and the economically developed regions, and low CO2 emission regions distributed centrally within the central region and less developed areas of the tourism economy. It is worth noting that the intra-regional differences mainly come from the eastern belt, and that there are large regional differences in tourism CO2 emissions within the eastern region, while the western region is the next largest and the central region the smallest.