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China is the top CO2-emitting nation, with emissions making up nearly a third (29.5%) of the global total in 2015 1. For this reason, international efforts to stabilize the Earth's climate depend heavily upon the trajectory of Chinese emissions, and the country's recent pledge to reduce its annual emissions before 2030 has been widely celebrated 2,3. Now, it is becoming clear that China may have already fulfilled this commitment: estimates made by various organizations indicate that-after more than decade of rapid growth-China's annual CO2 emissions have decreased year-on-year over the period 2013-2016. Although undoubtedly a watershed event, the peak of Chinese emissions prompts important questions about what factors are driving the current decrease, their relative importance, and whether or not the decline can be sustained or even accelerated. In particular, if China's emissions are have fallen primarily as a result of slowing economic activity, as happened in the U.S. during the global financial crisis 4 , renewed economic growth could reverse the decrease 5,6 .

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The impact of environmental regulation on enterprise innovation is closely related to the competitiveness of the enterprise and sustainable development of the regional economy, but existing research does not provide a consistent view. This paper summarizes the impacts of environmental regulation on enterprise innovation from the perspectives of technological innovation, product innovation, system innovation and ecological innovation. We find that the impacts of environmental regulation on enterprise innovation behaviour are complex, and that the impacts can be reflected together by the four aspects above and even by their interaction. Moreover, the impacts are not limited to the creation of new technologies, products, and systems but also include their adoption and application. In particular, whether the Porter hypothesis is true and which versions of the Porter hypothesis environmental regulation causes in enterprise innovation depend on enterprise characteristics, means of environmental regulation, and enterprises' strategic behaviours in an enterprise ecosystem. Finally, we propose five potential research directions: quantifying the degree of enterprise innovation caused by environmental regulation, the impacts of environmental regulation on sustainable economic development from an enterprise ecosystem perspective, the impacts of enterprise innovation on environmental regulation, the role of enterprise initiative in the relationship between environmental regulation and enterprise innovation, and social security issues and the integration of eliminated enterprises resulting from environmental regulation.