Overgrazing plays an important role in the grassland desertification in global drylands. The effectiveness of policies related to grazing directly affects efforts to combat desertification and sustainable rangeland management. However, there remain questions around how the interplay of grassland desertification and poverty affects the implementation of policies. To reveal the effectiveness of the desertification prevention policy that delineates national key ecological function areas (NKEFAs), the main objective was to perform a sustainability assessment and on-site investigation in Northwest China. A parallel index system, which integrates the indices for economic input–output and material supply–demand to represent sustainability, and the indices for interview records from managers and questionnaires from residents to represent the effectiveness of NKEFA policy, was proposed to comprehensively judge the performance of NKEFA policy, and the underlying causes behind undesirable effects were further analyzed. The results indicate that (1) the performance of desertification control policy is related to socioeconomic conditions—a few counties with increased socioeconomic and land resource sustainability (SLS) are peri-urban or resource-rich; (2) the fact that the socioeconomic benefits of the NKEFA policy are not obvious to impoverished farmers greatly reduces their enthusiasm for preventing desertification; and (3) the livelihood needs and defective ecological compensation force residents with underdeveloped comprehensive quality to overdevelop or use grassland resources even though they have received subsidies for conserving grassland. It is concluded that poverty and grassland desertification interact to influence potential policy performance. Our analysis can help decision makers to formulate desertification control policies with multiple goals to achieve sustainable performance in an economy–ecology system.

Rapid regional development and intensified human activities increasingly disturb ecosystems, posing substantial threats to the integrity of large-scale ecological zones. As a World Natural Heritage site and a crucial national ecological zone, the Zhangjiajie Scenic Area plays a pivotal role in China’s environmental conservation efforts. To comprehensively assess tourism ecological security in the Scenic Area and strengthen the scientific basis for resource management and policymaking, this study developed a multi-dimensional ecological security evaluation system covering 2010–2024, incorporating dynamic changes in perturbation, reaction, and governance. Using entropy weight–TOPSIS and coupling coordination models, combined with obstacle degree analysis, we examined the temporal trajectory of ecological security and analyzed its underlying driving mechanisms. The study also examined factors influencing the sustainable development of the ecosystem. The results indicate the following: (1) Tourism ecological security in the Scenic Area followed a V-shaped trajectory of “rapid degradation—steady recovery—impact and rebound.” It declined sharply to an unsafe level between 2010 and 2014, steadily recovered from 2015 to 2019, briefly dropped in 2020, and then rebounded, reaching a peak evaluation value of 0.519 in 2024. (2) The co-evolution of perturbation, reaction, and governance subsystems has matured: their coupling coordination degree has increased annually and has remained at the level of “intermediate coordination” since 2020. The reaction subsystem plays a central role, serving as a bridge between perturbation and governance. (3) The driving factors exhibit a phased evolutionary pattern of “elements—facilities—structure—function.” Cultivated land area, total road mileage, and artificial afforestation area constitute the main long-term constraints. This research provides important insights for strengthening ecological security and sustainability in the Scenic Area while advancing regional ecosystem development. It also offers valuable guidance for ecological security management and policymaking in similar nature reserves.

In the context of global climate change and the green transformation of the tourism industry, low-carbon tourism has emerged as an important topic within the field of sustainable development research. Consequently, there is a pressing need to systematically review and synthesize its knowledge domain. This study utilizes bibliometric analysis, employing CiteSpace, to review 468 articles published in the Web of Science Core Collection from 2010 to 2026, thereby elucidating publication trends, keyword clustering, and research hotspots within the field of low-carbon tourism. Additionally, it employs content analysis to provide an in-depth discussion of the knowledge system in this research area. Key findings are as follows: (1) The number of published papers on low-carbon tourism exhibits a phased growth pattern, with contributions predominantly centered around scholars such as Gössling and institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Moreover, keyword co-occurrence and clustering analyses uncover a development from essential concepts such as low-carbon tourism and climate change to a more extensive range of themes, including carbon emission accounting, tourist behavior, and systemic governance, and research topics have undergone a phased evolution, moving from macro-level cognition to quantitative analysis, and then to systemic governance. (2) The research hotspots encompass five key areas: basic cognition and related concepts, carbon emission accounting methods and applications, factors influencing emissions and assessment frameworks, tourists’ low-carbon behaviors and decision-making mechanisms, and pathways for multi-party collaborative governance. (3) Current research is still facing four challenges, i.e., the absence of a standardized framework for assessing carbon emissions, outdated assessment methods, a disconnect between behaviors and governance, and fragmented governance entities. This indicates that research on low-carbon tourism has progressed beyond the initial macro-level discussions and has entered a critical phase closely linked to substantive governance. Future research needs to focus on deeply exploring the standardization of accounting methods, the development of dynamic assessment models, the design of behavioral intervention mechanisms, and the establishment of multi-level collaborative governance mechanisms. These efforts are essential to provide scientific evidence and practical guidelines for the global tourism industry to achieve neutrality goals.