The race against carbon footprint: how China’s green technological innovation, tourism development and financial policies shape its ecological future

The global endeavor to combat climate change has elevated environmental sustainability to a critical priority, creating an urgent need for effective strategies to achieve it. This study examines the relationships between green technology innovation, tourism development, financial development, and economic growth on China's ecological footprint from 1995 to 2023. Using the Quantile Autoregressive Distributed Lag (QARDL) approach, this study analyzes asymmetric effects across different quantiles. The results show that green technology innovation reduces the ecological footprint at higher quantiles (β = -0.096 at the 95th), while tourism development increases environmental degradation, with coefficients ranging from - 0.428 at the 30th to - 0.262 at the 95th quantile. Financial development promotes sustainability at the middle quantiles, although effectiveness diminishes at higher levels. Economic growth worsens the ecological footprint (β = 0.652 at the 80th percentile). Short-run estimates show that tourism development has negative impacts, whereas green technology innovation reduces the footprint at higher quantiles. Moran's I indices indicate spatial dependence in tourism (0.85 in 2005) and financial development (0.78 in 2002), with green technology showing a weaker clustering. These findings necessitate differentiated provincial policies on eco-tourism, green technology adoption, and sustainable funding to reduce China's ecological footprint while balancing growth.