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 CO₂emissions are greater than the inter-regional differences and exhibit a gradient of “West > Central > East”. Furthermore, it was also accidentally discovered that the dynamic evolution of tourism CO₂ emissions showed polarization or multi-pole differences with obvious gradient characteristics. 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