The achievement of carbon emission reduction targets for three typical tourism industries: A coordinated analysis based on efficiency and potential

The cultural, leisure, and natural tourism industries are selected, which are the greatest tourism carbon emitters and have significantly different carbon sources and sinks. We analyzed the realization mechanism of tourism emission reduction, classified their emission reduction capability coordinated efficiency and potential, and analyze their preferential implementation strategies. Our results show that: (1) The direction of tourism emission reduction includes increasing the value-added potential of desired and undesired outputs and improving the technologies in tourism energy-saving and emission-reduction. (2) The average emission reduction potentials are 51.31%, 59.99%, and 42.01% for the cultural, leisure, and natural tourism industries, respectively, and the average net carbon efficiencies are 0.578, 0.650, and 0.602, respectively. (3) For the cultural tourism, the strategy of reducing the tourism output inefficiency (S-ROIE) is optimal for provinces with high-efficiency and high-potential; the strategy of reducing the carbon emission inefficiency (S-REIE) is optimal for provinces with high-efficiency and low-potential; the S-ROIE is optimal for regions with low-efficiency and low-potential; the strategy of technology progress in energy-saving (S-ESTP) is optimal for provinces with low-efficiency and high-potential. (4) For the leisure tourism, the S-ESTP is optimal for provinces with high-efficiency and high-potential; the S-REIE is optimal for provinces with high-efficiency and low-potential; the S-ROIE is optimal for provinces with low-efficiency and low-potential; the strategy of technology progress in emission reduction (S-ERTP) is optimal for provinces with low-efficiency and high-potential. (5) For the natural tourism, the S-REIE is optimal for provinces with high-efficiency and high-potential; the S-ROIE is optimal for provinces with high-efficiency and low-potential; the S-ERTP is optimal for provinces with low-efficiency and low-potential; the S-REIE is optimal for provinces with low-efficiency and high-potential