Emergy-based analysis of agriculture-tourism-ecology system: A longitudinal case study of a typical coffee-growing village in southwest China

Against the backdrop of accelerating climate change, ecological degradation and China’s rural-revitalisation agenda, assessing and guiding the long-term sustainability of coupled “agriculture–tourism–ecology” (ATE) systems has become a key focus for the scientific and policy communities. This study takes Xinzhai Village as a case, applying emergy theory to systematically analyze the village’s ATE system from 2009 to 2024. The results show that (1) the ATE system remained highly dependent on external economic inputs throughout the 16-year period; (2) the agricultural subsystem achieved significant efficiency improvement, driven by intensive coffee cultivation and adoption of advanced technologies; (3) the tourism subsystem experienced severe volatility due to exogenous shocks but recovered rapidly with post-shock tourism-resource development; (4) the system transitioned from a “natural resource-driven” to an “economic input-dominated” model, accompanied by a continuous increase in environmental pressure. The study recommends optimizing agricultural input structures to maintain high efficiency, enhancing tourism service added value to stabilize the subsystem’s recovery and scaling up waste recycling technologies to alleviate environmental burdens.