Do Ecotourism Demonstration Areas Mitigate Tourism Carbon Emissions in China?—A Perspective Based on Quasi-Natural Experimentation

The close association between policy deployment in ecotourism demonstration areas and low-carbon tourism makes it imperative to explore whether such policies can effectively curb carbon emissions in the tourism sector. This study utilizes an evolutionary game model to theoretically analyze the mechanisms of stakeholders’ strategic tendencies following policy deployment in ecotourism. Empirically, using panel data from 276 prefecture-level cities across China from 2010 to 2019, the establishment of ecotourism demonstration areas was treated as a “quasi-natural experiment”. A multi-period difference-in-differences model was employed to evaluate the inhibitory effects of the policy on tourism carbon emissions and its underlying pathways in the establishment of ecological tourism demonstration zones. The theoretical mechanism reveals that, after the deployment of ecotourism demonstration area policies, local governments, tourism enterprises, and tourists tend to choose low-carbon strategic behaviors. Empirical analysis reveals that ecotourism demonstration areas effectively curb carbon emissions in the tourism industry. The inhibitory effect of the policy exhibits regional heterogeneity, with a significant impact on carbon emission reduction in eastern cities. The policy exerts its inhibitory effects on tourism carbon emissions through increased ecological tourism investment by local governments and self-scaling cointegration by tourism enterprises.