Exploring the Ecological Performance of China’s Tourism Industry: A Three-Stage Undesirable SBM-DEA Approach with Carbon Footprint

The environmental impact of carbon emissions and the carbon footprint from tourism activities are significant for promoting low-carbon development in the tourism industry. This paper employed a bottom-up approach to estimate the carbon footprint and energy consumption of China’s tourism industry. Then, the three-stage undesirable SBM-DEA model was employed to evaluate and decompose the eco-efficiency of China’s provincial tourism industry from 2008 to 2017. The results showed that the eco-efficiency of most provinces has experienced a slight increase during the past ten years, while management inefficiency within the tourism industry has been the main restriction of the utilization of tourism resources in most regions. The decomposition and quadrant analysis indicated that scale efficiency was the direct driver of the poor ecological performance in Northeast China, while technical efficiency dominated the tourism eco-efficiency in South-Central China. These two issues have together led to the poor utilization of the rich tourism resources and the natural environment in Southwest China. On the basis of these discussions, differentiated policy implications towards different kinds of regions were provided to promote low-carbon development and to realize the potential of tourism resources in China’s tourism industry.