Carbon emissions have become a new threat to sustainable development in China, and local government actions can play an important role in energy conservation and emission reduction. This paper explores the theoretical mechanisms and transmission paths of economic growth targets affecting carbon emissions from the perspective of economic growth targets and conducts an empirical analysis based on 30 provincial panel data in China from 2003 to 2019. The results show that: economic growth targets are positively correlated with carbon emissions under a series of endogeneity and robustness; there are regional heterogeneity, target heterogeneity and structural heterogeneity in the impact of economic growth targets on carbon emissions; after economic growth targets are set, government actions can influence carbon emissions by affecting resource mismatch and industrial restructuring; It is further found that there is a “U” shaped relationship between economic pressure and carbon emissions. Based on the above findings, this paper further proposes that a high-quality performance assessment mechanism should be developed to bring into play the active role of local governments in achieving carbon reduction goals, and thus contribute to high-quality economic development.

The air pollution problem, represented by the frequent occurrence of haze, has seriously affected the quality of China’s economic growth. Along with the in-depth implementation of the concept of sustainable development and the continued strengthening of the central government’s environmental accountability, local governments’ environmental concerns have also increased. Therefore, can the local government mitigate the haze pollution by an emphasis on environmental concerns? Based on theoretical analysis, this paper uses text analysis and machine learning to construct local government environmental concerns indicators, and selects a panel of 284 cities in China from 2007 to 2020 for research. The study shows that local government environmental concerns effectively reduce haze pollution, and the conclusion still holds after considering robustness. Local government ecological concerns can force cities to improve green innovation and industrial structure optimization, alleviating haze pollution. There are heterogeneous effects of local government environmental concerns on haze pollution under different regions, different resource endowments, different central assessment systems and different changes in government officials; the Difference-In-Difference results show that, in addition to local government environmental concerns, central government ecological concerns can also reduce haze pollution. Based on the above findings, the central government should further improve the officials’ appraisal system and give play to the government’s active role in environmental governance.

Improving the efficiency of converting natural resources into social benefits is an important issue for sustainable development in today’s world. Based on this background this paper applies the super-efficient SBM model with non-expected output to measure the ecological welfare performance (EWP) of Chinese provinces from 2005–2019, and explores the relationship between government competition and EWP under different assessment systems. The research results show that government competition under economic performance assessment is self-interested and short-sighted, which can negatively affect ecological welfare performance in the current period as well as in the next four years. In contrast, government competition under the environmental assessment system promotes EWP in both the current and long term, balancing short-term and long-term benefits. The results of the spatial GMM found that government competition under economic performance appraisal can deteriorate EWP in local as well as surrounding areas, but government competition under the environmental assessment system can achieve an increase in local ecological welfare performance and the spillover effect is not significant. To alleviate the limitations of a single appraisal system, this paper incorporates both economic and ecological appraisals into the multidimensional appraisal system. When the weights of both are between 1:9 and 3:7, the government competition under multidimensional performance appraisal can promote both current and longer-term EWP, and achieve its own ecological welfare performance without affecting the surrounding areas.