China is performing a dominant role in the world’s economic growth, but it has mainly been the commencement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that has significantly increased its importance around the world. Recently, the emergence of the tourism industry has been considered as an alternative for sustainable economic and ecological development, which is ironic. Although China is promoting tourism in various regions under “The New Normal” phase, it needs to proactively address the challenges of dismantling, for the environment. The fundamental objective of the current study is to determine the long-term affiliation between tourism development, economic progress, transportation, energy consumption, value added hotel catering services, and environmental degradation (CO₂) for a panel of thirty (30) provinces of China over the period of 1995–2017. Primarily, we applied the CD test for investigating cross dependence; subsequently, conventional and CD based panel unit root tests (CIPS) were carried out to deal with the puzzle of the stationarity of the panel series. The results of the dynamics panel, DOLS, FMOLS, and PMG, indicated that transportation, energy consumption, and value added hotel and catering services have a strong positive association with carbon emission, but tourism development has mixed links with ecological degradation. Additionally, the causative based test revealed the bidirectional association of tourism development, transportation, economic progress, and energy consumption with environmental quality. The retrieved estimates conferred a few guidelines, concerning the presence of BRI projects, for the Chinese administration at the provincial and national level: initiating the renewable based energy projects and possibly wishing to decrease the use of fossil fuel based energy in the industry, transportation, and hotels and catering sectors. Furthermore, the prevalence of green investment in provinces may motivate economic progress and tourism development, without worsening the atmosphere.

The gradual adjustment of fertility and retirement policies in China has social benefits in terms of coping with population aging. However, the environmental consequences of these policies remain ambiguous. Here we compile environmentally extended multiregional input–output tables to estimate household carbon footprints for different population age groups in China. Subsequently, we estimate the age-sex-specific population under different fertility policies up to 2060 and assess the impacts of fertility and retirement policies on household carbon footprints. We find that Chinese young people have relatively higher household carbon footprints than their older counterparts due to differences in income by age group. Relaxing fertility policies and delaying retirement age are associated with an increase in population (and labour supply) and thus increases in household carbon footprints, with the majority of these increases from the fertility side. These results may help policymakers understand interactions among those measures targeting population aging and climate action.

To promote economic and social development with reduced carbon dioxide emissions, the key lies in determining how to improve carbon emission efficiency (CEE). We first measured the CEE of each province by using the input-oriented three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and DEA-Malmquist model for the panel data of 30 provinces in China during 2000–2017. Then we explored the CEE differences and characteristics of different regions obtained by using hierarchical clustering of each province’s CEE. Finally, based on the regression model, we conducted an empirical analysis of the impact of each factor of total factor productivity (TFP) on CEE. The main findings of this research are as follows: (1) The industrial structure, energy structure, government regulation, technological innovation, and openness had a significant impact on CEE; (2) The variation trends of CEE and TFP in the eight regions we studied were convergent, while the variations of CEE among regions were diverse and all distributed stably in different ranges; (3) The eight regions’ efficiency basically showed a downward trend of eastern, central and western China; (4) Technological regression was the main reason for the decline in TFP. Technological progress and technological efficiency can contribute to an improvement in CEE. Based on the findings above, we provide decision-making references for comprehensively improving the efficiency of various regions and accelerating China’s energy conservation, emissions reduction, and coordinated development.

The dual problems of the public crisis from the global epidemic and the deterioration of the ecological environment constrain the economic development in the Yellow River Basin. To promote the sustainable and balanced development in the Yellow River Basin, this paper takes public health, ecological environment, and economic development, as a whole, to study the coordinated development of the Yellow River Basin. Based on coupling coordinated theory, we use the SMI-P method to evaluate the coordinated development index of public health, the ecological environment, and economic development in the Yellow River Basin. Moreover, we use the coordinated regulation and obstacle factor diagnosis to identify the main influencing factors and design regulation methods to optimize the coordinated development index. The results found that (1), during the research period, there is spatiotemporal heterogeneity in the coordinated development level in the Yellow River Basin. From 2009 to 2019, the overall development index increased steadily, while the regional disparity in the coordinated development level was obvious. (2) The ecological environment indicators contribute more to the relevance and obstacle factors, such as the average concentration of fine particulate matter, per capita arable land area, afforestation area, etc. (3) After regulating the overall development level of the Yellow River Basin, we prove that Path 4, which comprehensively considers the relevance and obstacle factors, performs better.