China has been the world’s largest producer and consumer of paper products. In the context of the “carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals”, China’s papermaking industry which is traditionally a high energy-consuming and high-emissions industry, desperately needs a nationally appropriate low-carbon development path. From the consumption-side perspective, this paper calculates the CO₂ emissions of China’s papermaking industry from 2000 to 2019 by using carbon emission nuclear algorithm, grain-straw ratio, first-order attenuation method, and STIRFDT decomposition model, etc., to further explore the core stages and basic patterns affecting the industry’s carbon peaking. The results show that the total CO₂ emissions of China’s papermaking industry showed an upward trend from 2000–2013, stable from 2013–2017, and a steady but slight decline from 2017–2019. Meanwhile, the total CO₂ emissions of the full life cycle of paper products in China have decreased to a certain extent in the raw material acquisition, pulp, and paper making and shipping stages, with only the waste paper disposal stage showing a particular upward trend. We find that from 2000 to 2019, China’s CO₂ emissions in the pulping and papermaking stage of paper products accounted for 68% of the total emissions in the whole life cycle, of which 59% was caused by coal consumption. Moreover, the scenario prediction shows that improving the energy structure and increasing the waste paper recovery rate can reduce the CO₂ emissions of the industry, and it is more significant when both work. Based on this and the four core stages of CO₂ emissions of the papermaking industry we proposed ways to promote CO₂ emissions peaking of China’s paper products.

Reconciling economic growth with environmental protection continues to represent a central global challenge. As one of the world’s largest developing economies, China has advanced an ecological civilization strategy that offers a unique opportunity to evaluate how national policy can shape sustainable development trajectories. This study assesses whether China’s ecological civilization construction enhances urban green total factor productivity (GTFP). Using panel data for 283 Chinese cities (2006–2019), this study identifies ecological civilization pilot cities through a standardized and reproducible protocol, measures urban GTFP using the Global Malmquist–Luenberger (GML) index and estimates policy effects with a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) design that accounts for staggered implementation and overlapping policies. The results indicate that urban GTFP exhibited an overall upward but fluctuating trend during the study period, with regional growth rates ranking East > Central > West and a tendency toward convergence in recent years. The analysis further indicates that national ecological civilization construction policies exert a statistically significant and positive effect on urban GTFP, with the findings remaining robust to parallel trend tests and multiple robustness checks. The promotion effect displays marked regional heterogeneity, being strongest in western cities, followed by eastern and central regions, and remains positive across different urban contexts, including resource-based and non-resource-based cities as well as cities within and outside the Yangtze River Economic Belt. Mechanism analysis further reveals that the policy effect operates primarily through industrial upgrading and green technological innovation, whereas the industrial structure rationalization channel is not statistically significant. Overall, this study provides a transparent and reproducible framework for pilot city identification and causal evaluation, offering policy-relevant insights for differentiated and region-specific ecological governance aimed at balanced regional development, industrial upgrading, and green technological innovation.