1. Introduction
At present, the industrial status and benefits of tourism in the world economy have been significantly improved, and it has increasingly become an emerging hot spot and an important development direction for consumption growth. Tourism is one of the fastest-growing socio-economic fields. In 2018, the number of global tourist arrivals was 12.11 billion, and the global total tourism revenue was 5.8 trillion US dollars, contributing 6.7% of global GDP [
1,
2]. The tourism industry has low resource consumption, many employment opportunities, and high overall benefits. Therefore, it is an important format of the modern service industry and an important direction for industrial structure adjustment in many countries. In 2019, the number of domestic tourists in China was 6.006 billion, a year-on-year increase of 8.4%, the number of inbound tourists was 14.53 million, and the total annual tourism revenue was 0.96 trillion US dollars [
3]. Tourism is an important means of sustainable development, and it has broad development prospects in the field of action to promote the realization of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and various sustainable development goals [
4]. At the same time, sustainable development is the foundation of tourism development. Research on the relationship and influence mechanism of tourism activities with social, economic, and environmental factors and exploring ways of sustainable development of tourism are the difficulties and research hotspots faced by the world tourism industry [
5,
6]. At this stage, under the new development situation of tourism, such as the popularization of tourism income, the increasing demand for high-quality tourism, and the modernization of the tourism industry, how to further stimulate the driving force of tourism resources for economic transformation, enable more cities with excellent tourism resources to convert resources into productivity, and lead the ecological construction through the development of tourism are issues that researchers and governments need to consider.
Urban tourism includes tourist activities in the city and its impact on society, economy, and environment [
7,
8]. Urban tourism has become a new growth point of modern tourism, which has gradually enriched research on urban tourism [
9]. While tourism flow brings more and more economic benefits, it may also cause negative social, cultural, environmental, and ecological impacts, which not only affect the quality of tourists’ tourism experience but also restrict the development of the tourism economy [
10,
11,
12]. The conflict between urban sprawl and environmental pollution is also more intense in tourist cities that rely on both the development of urbanization and the quality of the ecological environment [
13]. Ecotourism is an important plan for minimizing the impact of tourism on the ecosystem, but it requires that each city or region share the sustainability standards and monitoring tools used to assess the impact [
14]. In order to measure the ability of natural resources to support human production and daily life under the influence of urbanization, the resource and environmental carrying capacity evaluation system has received more and more attention [
15,
16]. The accounting methods of regional natural capital mainly include the ecological footprint (
EF) method, the net productivity method, the material flow analysis method, and the energy flow method [
17,
18,
19]. Among them, the
EF method is widely used by researchers in terms of the ecological effects of urban expansion.
The
EF measures the sustainable status of regional economic development by estimating the ecologically productive area required for consumption and absorbing waste discharge in a specific area and comparing it with the ecologically productive area that the area can provide [
20]. Since the theory was put forward in 1992, it has received extensive attention from researchers. Scholars from various countries have continuously adjusted the adaptability of the
EF model and have derived many analytical methods to explore the correlation between
EF and other elements [
16,
21,
22,
23,
24]. The
EF method has rich empirical analysis in the analysis of dynamic changes in different industries, different provinces and cities, and different time scales [
17,
25,
26,
27,
28,
29,
30]. The
EF is closely related to the degree of economic development, and regions or cities with a higher degree of economic development generally have a higher per capita
EF [
31]. While urbanization has a negative impact on the ecological capacity (
EC), as the spatial carrier of urbanization, it also has an increasingly counter-force to urbanization [
32]. Therefore, the analysis of the driving forces of the
EF in combination with the indicators that reflect urban development is a useful supplement to the study of
EF [
33]. It mainly includes studying the historical development process of the
EF in a longer time series, establishing an autoregressive model, and establishing a single or multiple regression equation of the
EF and the main driving factors [
34,
35,
36,
37]. In terms of specific analysis methods, the researchers have used partial least squares regression, neural network methods, co-integration theory, and error correction models to analyze the driving factors of
EF and predict future trends [
38,
39,
40,
41,
42].
Existing
EF accounting models often only consider biological resources and energy consumption, ignoring the impact of various pollutants discharged and the large amount of water consumed by urban residents on the
EF, making the results unable to highlight the differences between cities [
43]. Once pollutants are released into the environment, they will occupy productive land and cause environmental damages, which are difficult to repair. In addition to the function of fishery production, water resources, as an essential resource, play an important role in supporting urban development and maintaining the ecological balance [
23,
44,
45]. Previous studies have mainly used two-dimensional time series (time and indicators) data, but the two-dimensional information model often fails to meet actual analysis needs. The panel data contains three-dimensional information of cross-section, time, and indicators. It can be used to construct and test behavior equations that are more realistic than the cross-section or time-series data for deeper analysis [
26]. In order to further explore the development law and driving factors of the
EF of tourist cities, this paper selected 16 typical tourist cities in China, constructed a revised
EF model and panel data analysis model, combined land use data, statistical data, and macroeconomic data, explored the efficiency of green development and the main driving factors of these cities from 2000 to 2017. Firstly, the
EF of each city was calculated, and pollutant emissions and water resource were included in the
EF model; secondly, the efficiency of green development of the selected cities was analyzed through relevant indicators; the panel data model of the social-economic system and the ecosystem was established to test the impact of various indicators of urbanization on the
EF of the tourist city; finally, the cluster analysis was used to classify the selected cities, and suggestions are made for the future development of tourism in different types of tourist cities.
5. Conclusions and Suggestions
This paper selected 16 typical tourist cities in China and used EF to analyze the efficiency of green development and the main driving factors that cause changes from 2000 to 2017. First, among the 16 cities studied, the EF of Huangshan is slightly larger than the EC, and the EC and EF of Guilin and Sanya are basically the same. The EF of the other 13 cities all exceeds their EC. The contradiction between supply and demand with the carrying capacity of the ecosystem is significant. Secondly, the selected cities all have a certain degree of low ecological security and poor ecological and economic coordination, which means the green development of these cities need to further improve. However, the utilization efficiency of natural resources is increasing year by year, and the pressure on the ecological environment is gradually alleviating. Third, the results of panel data analysis show that the proportion of the primary industry in GDP, the proportion of the secondary industry in GDP, the per capita investment in fixed assets, and the length of highways per 10,000 people can increase the per capita EF. The proportion of the tertiary industry in GDP, the urbanization rate, the number of granted patents, the forest coverage rate, the percentage of greenery coverage in built-up areas, the per capita cultivated land area, and the per capita tourism consumption can reduce the per capita EF. In the process of exploring the green development of tourist cities, these driving factors need to be considered comprehensively to ensure the balance between urban development and ecological environment quality. Finally, the 16 selected cities are divided into four categories, and differentiated management suggestions on future ecological construction and tourism development are put forward to achieve sustainable tourism development.
Based on the researches in this article, the following suggestions are given for the green development of tourist cities in the future:
First, implement the division of labor and optimize the industrial structure. On the one hand, promote the coordinated development of tourism and agriculture. The primary industry is the foundation of national economic development, and cultivated land resources are an important part of the EF calculation. The contradiction between economic growth and limited cultivated land resources should be paid close attention to. At the same time, we must actively stimulate knowledge, technology, and information to become new driving forces for the development of the primary industry. Tourist cities should actively explore the social and economic development forms of mutual penetration and integration of agriculture and tourism and use their own resource advantages to develop characteristic tourism projects, such as rural tourism, experience tourism, and sightseeing agriculture. For cities with low per capita tourism consumption, it is necessary to actively introduce guiding policies and increase relevant investment to stimulate the further development of tourism.
Second, focus on promoting the sustainable development of tourism. Due to the particularity of tourist cities, their requirements for the quality of the natural environment are higher. It is more necessary to protect the landscape resources and environment through ecological conservation to realize the coordinated development of tourism and ecological construction. It is of great significance to improve the ecological carrying capacity, reduce or even reverse the ecological deficit, and realize the ecological balance to keep the city’s environmental resource endowment well. Cities with a large per capita EF should optimize the urban ecological environment through advanced industrial structure and rapid development of the service industry. For cities with small per capita EF and high natural resource endowment while tourism is not fully developed, governments should guide high-grade tourism, such as leisure tourism and experience tourism, actively advocate green tourism consumption, implement green tourism development, strengthen tourism environmental protection, and innovate green development mechanisms to stimulate the vitality of the local tourism market.
Third, promote a circular economy and gradually improve the energy structure. Fossil energy often occupies a major position in EF accounting. The dependence of current economic development on fossil energy cannot be significantly reduced in the short term. Therefore, in order to reduce the EF, improving energy efficiency, improving energy consumption structure, and developing environmentally friendly clean energy are very necessary and effective measures. The research and development of clean energy should be emphasized to promote the decoupling of economic growth and resource consumption.
Finally, handle the relationship between urbanization and ecological civilization. Blindly pursuing the urbanization and the size of the city will increase ecological pressure. Population growth should be controlled to keep pace with the improvement of EC and production capacity and avoid the increase of total EF caused by excessive population growth. It is necessary to integrate the concept of green, low-carbon, and ecological development into the entire process of the urbanization construction and formulate corresponding policies to mitigate the negative effects of urbanization, such as carbon taxes, emissions trading, and marketization of energy prices. It should be noted that due to differences in environmental pollution and urban expansion rates in different cities, the reasons for their formation are also different. This requires the corresponding development paths for cities in different regions and different stages of development in management strategies to achieve the coordinated development of urbanization and ecological civilization.
It needs to be pointed out that there are still many directions to be explored in the research on EF. First of all, the EF method is used for ecological sustainability analysis. The method is ecologically biased and does not consider people’s satisfaction with the existing consumption patterns. It needs to be combined with other methods to further reflect the status and goals of sustainable development. In addition, for modern cities, there is often a problem of centralization of economic function and the transfer of other functions to surrounding urban agglomerations, which will make EF calculated by traditional methods too large. In future related researches, urban agglomerations can be used as the research object to discuss the transfer of EFs between different cities so as to explore the management and planning methods of ecological environment based on EFs from a regional perspective.