The impact of China’s Central Environmental Protection Inspection on carbon emissions of tourism industry

The Central Environmental Protection Inspection (CEPI) has become a key force across China in addressing the upsurging environmental issues in recent years. Previous studies have focused more on the impact of CEPI on corporate environmental action and air pollution, very few studies have revealed the effectiveness of CEPI in reducing carbon emission Spatial Network Structure of China’s Provincial- of specific industries, like tourism. This paper uses a two-way fixed-effects model to analyse whether CEPI affects the carbon emissions of the tourism industry based on panel data of 117 cities in China from 2013 to 2019. The results show that the CEPI has an inhibitory effect on the tourism carbon emissions, and this effect continued to strengthen until the third period when the inhibitory effect disappeared. The mechanism analysis shows that CEPI can reduce carbon emissions from tourism by promoting the ecologization of the tourism industry. Our findings provide evidence for using CEPI to achieve the tourism carbon reduction target.