Framework for accounting for tourism carbon emissions in China: An industrial linkage perspective

Abstract

Understanding tourism carbon emissions and their influencing factors from the perspective of industrial linkages can inform policy-making in the development of sustainable tourism. Based on a combination of the environmental input–output (I-O) model and structural decomposition analysis, this article develops a novel framework for analyzing the industrial linkage pathways of China’s carbon emissions linked to tourism and identifying the driving factors affecting change in carbon emissions embodied in the supply chain. Results reveal that most carbon emissions linked to China’s broad-sense or narrow-sense tourism industry derive from some critical upstream industries, that is, indirect carbon emissions resulting from the intermediate production processes. Significant differences exist in the industrial linkage pathways of carbon emissions between tourism subsectors; thus, emission reduction policies for the broad-sense or narrow-sense tourism industry should be formulated based on these key interindustrial linkage pathways. The direct energy consumption intensity effect and energy structure effect are beneficial to carbon emission reduction, while the I-O structure effect reverses the effect on carbon emission reduction from negative to positive.