Climate change and environmental issues caused by carbon emissions have attracted the attention of governments around the world. Drawing on the experience of the EU, China is actively developing a national carbon emissions trading market, trying to encourage emission entities to incorporate carbon emissions reduction into production and consumption decisions through carbon pricing. Is this scheme an effective market-incentivized environmental regulatory policy? Since China successively launched ETS pilots in 2013, the effectiveness of reducing carbon emissions has become one of the current focus issues. This study uses the difference-in-differences (DID) method to evaluate the impact of ETS implementation on emissions reduction and employs the Super-SBM model in data envelopment analysis (DEA) to evaluate the emission-reduction efficiency of eight ETS pilots in China. We find that the carbon trading policy has achieved emission-reduction effects in the implementation stage, and the greenness of economic growth has a significant positive impact on regional GDP. The establishment of China’s unified carbon market should be coordinated with regional development. Some supporting measures for regional ecological compensation and the mitigation of regional development are yet to be adopted.

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.

In the context of the global pandemic, the development of tourism in the Yellow River Basin is constrained by the dual mechanisms of the decline in the quality of public service and the deterioration of the ecological environment. In order to promote the high-quality development of the ecological environment in the Yellow River Basin, this paper studies the coordinated development of tourism, the ecological environment and public service in the Yellow River Basin by treating tourism, the ecological environment and public service as a whole. Based on the coupling coordination function GM (1,1) grey prediction method and PVAR model, we discuss the characteristics of spatio-temporal differences, evolutionary trends and the interaction mechanism of the coupling coordination degree (CCD) of tourism-ecological environment-public service in nine provinces along the Yellow River Basin in China from 2008 to 2019. The results show that tourism and public service in the Yellow River Basin are closely related, and the protection of the ecological environment and tourism development are not contradictory. In terms of time, the overall trend is stable and upward from the perspective of the CCD of the three systems; in terms of space, Henan, Shandong, and Sichuan provinces have a relatively high level of CCD. While Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces have a lower level of CCD, which shows an upward trend from upstream to downstream in the space. The evolutionary trend of the CCD of the three systems in the basin will be upward in all provinces except for the Shandong province in the next five years. Tourism can promote both the ecological environment and public service from the perspective of the mutual influence mechanism.

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.