The evaluation of tourism climate comfort is a systematic assessment of the climate conditions of tourist destinations. It is of great significance for improving the tourism experience, promoting the sustainable development of the tourism industry, and protecting the natural environment. In this study, the CiteSpace software was used to conduct a bibliometrics analysis of the study on tourism climate comfort in China, and the conceptual framework of this study was established based on the bibliometrics results. In the conceptual framework, this study firstly summarized eight indicators widely used in the current evaluation of tourism climate comfort. Secondly, four key technical means in the evaluation process were summarized, including geographic information system, analytic hierarchy process, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation, and cluster analysis. And three calculation methods of tourism climate comfort period were summarized, namely number of days with comfortable climate, five-day moving average method, and probability of climate-suitable days. Subsequently, the main application areas of tourism climate comfort evaluation were introduced: (1) exploration of the relationship between climate comfort and tourism activities (i.e., heat/cold-escape tourism, ice-snow tourism, outdoor rafting, coastal tourism, and other types of tourism activities); (2) exploration of the relationship between climate comfort and tourist flow; (3) the response of climate comfort to climate change; and (4) tourism climate regionalization. Finally, the main problems of current research and future development directions were proposed.

For tourist cities, coordination between tourism and socio-economic and natural environments is crucial for sustainable urban development. While the positive correlation between a Natural World Heritage (NWH) designation and local urban tourism growth has been validated, the interplay among tourism, the economy, and the environment remains underexplored. We conceptualize NWH cities as complex adaptive systems and establish an evaluation framework to assess the relationships among tourism, economic, and environmental subsystems. Using 34 NWH cities in China as case studies, we apply a coupling coordination degree model to evaluate the sustainability indices of the three subsystems and their interrelationships. Additionally, the obstacle degree model identifies specific obstacles in cities with suboptimal coordination, leading to targeted management recommendations. Our findings reveal that while tourism and economic sustainability indices have shown consistent upward trends, environmental sustainability has experienced a decline. The coupling coordination degrees among the three subsystems have generally increased, albeit with fluctuations in some cities. Environmental-related indicators are the main obstacle factors to imbalanced development in some cities from 2015 to 2020. Therefore, the primary challenge for sustainable management lies in the environmental subsystem. This study provides a relational perspective for evaluating the sustainability of NWH cities and offers targeted recommendations for enhancing their sustainable development, contributing to the broader discourse on heritage management and sustainable urban practices.