On China's sustainable future : How do eco-technological innovations and financial development moderate the tourism-environmental pollution nexus?

Abstract

The global anthropogenic activities among nations are largely behind the growing environmental concerns of our modern time. The rise of China on the frontiers of all economic activities with rapidly booming industries including the tourism industry has raised valid concern about the country's future sustainability. Past studies have largely focused on CO2 perhaps because of the long-lasting environmental damages from the atmospheric accumulation of this greenhouse gas (GHG) relative to other gases like methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide emissions N2O. However, there is a need to examine other greenhouse gases given that their immediate warming impacts could be much more pronounced over a relatively shorter period. As such, China's sustainability future was assessed via direct & indirect environmental aspects of the booming tourism industry while exploring the moderating roles of eco-technological innovations and financial development. The robust empirical simulation capitalizes on the Dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag (DARDL) framework. We obtained the long-run evidence of the aggravating pollution impacts of tourism and financial development as revealed by the exacerbation of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. Additionally, isolating eco-technological innovations also revealed a short-run detrimental environmental impact. However, the environmental damages from both tourism expansion and financialization were significantly curtailed when interacting these factors with the overall eco-technological progress. The outcomes highlight to policymakers as well as authorities, the necessity of specifically prioritizing eco-related technologies in any policy framework for China's sustainable future.