Eliminating poverty is the common mission of all mankind, and it is also an important task faced by many countries. Pro-poor tourism villages are an active attempt by China to use rural tourism to escape poverty. This paper aims to provide theoretical support for consolidating the results of poverty alleviation and achieving comprehensive poverty alleviation and to provide a scientific basis for policy formulation by using GIS spatial analysis to study the spatial distribution characteristics and influencing factors of 22,651 pro-poor tourism villages in China. The findings revealed that the spatial distribution of pro-poor tourism villages is roughly divided by the Hu line. Pro-poor tourism villages show an uneven agglomeration pattern and present a spatial pattern of dense southeast and sparse northwest with six high-density core areas, among which some cities in the southwest are H-H agglomeration areas. Specifically, topography, annual rainfall, endowment of tourism resources, location transportation, and policy orientation are important factors affecting the spatial distribution of pro-poor tourism villages.

In the context of the global Sustainable Development Goals, the study of tourism eco-efficiency (TE) becomes particularly important for the balance between environmental protection and economic development in tourist destinations. This paper improves the measurement method of tourism carbon emissions, uses the Super-SBM model of undesired output to measure China’s TE, and then explores the impact of new urbanization (NU) on TE. The results show that TE in China is in dynamic equilibrium in general, the agglomeration characteristics of efficiency changed from high in the east and low in the west to low in the south and high in the north, and developmental differences first increased and then decreased. NU development has a significant one-way positive impact on TE at the national level and in the eastern region. As far as impact, economic urbanization plays a great role, and ecological factors become more and more important. NU has a rapid and long-term impact on TE, and its contribution rate to developed economic regions can reach 35%. This study will provide an important reference for sustainable development of tourism under the trend of urbanization.