1. Introduction
The era of global warming is not yet over, while the era of global boiling has already arrived. With rapid global industrialization and modernization, the excessive consumption of energy by humans has led to a dramatic increase in greenhouse gas emissions [
1], thereby exacerbating the global warming situation. Urban areas are the hotspots of human energy consumption, accounting for over 70% of global carbon emissions. For developing countries, residential energy consumption serves as a main engine for economic growth and a major source of regional carbon emissions [
2,
3]. For the rapidly urbanizing China, the direct and indirect carbon emissions caused by household consumption have driven the growth of carbon emissions over recent decades [
4]. In view of China’s current international commitments to achieve carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060, it is necessary to investigate the dynamics of carbon emissions from different types of consumption in Chinese households from a multi-scale perspective.
Recently, research concerning the energy-related carbon emissions of Chinese households has emerged. Su et al. (2023) [
5] conducted a dynamic assessment of residential energy consumption and related carbon emissions in Chinese households. It indicated that the annual carbon emissions caused by different types of Chinese households would decrease at different levels. Chen et al. (2023) [
6] studied the drivers of urban–rural disparities in household carbon emissions in China, and they found that the temporal and spatial characteristics in household carbon emissions between urban and rural areas were influenced by sociometric factors such as economic development levels, household consumption patterns, and demographic effects. Jiang et al. (2021) [
7] proposed that carbon emissions from households in rural areas may be much higher than those from urban households due to the different energy types used by urban and rural households. Yuan et al. (2019) [
8] revealed that the household carbon emissions in most coastal provinces and subordinate cities were mostly influenced by residents’ income levels and their demographic effects, while the higher household carbon emissions were observed in some non-coastal industrial provinces were due to laggard carbon-control technologies. Concerning the regional carbon emissions from northern agricultural regions, Liang et al. (2013) [
9] found that coal still was the main energy source resulting in the growth of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and these results were based on an investigation of the structural changes in household energy use from 1980 to 2009 in Shandong Province, northern China. Most current research concerning household carbon emissions has focused on the carbon emission characteristics of urban household consumption and their influencing factors, and relevant studies related to rural household consumption, especially at the county scale, are fewer. Although the limited studies conducted by Jiang et al. (2021) [
7] and Liang et al. (2013) [
9] investigated the carbon emissions of rural households in typical agricultural regions, they focused on suburban regions within metropolitan areas. Compared with rural households, fewer researchers have paid attention to the carbon issues of herdsman livelihoods, which may present different stories about carbon issues due to the different cultures of these ethnic minorities and the special topographies of the plateau regions. Therefore, the mere selection of urban and rural households as case studies cannot provide a comprehensive mapping of carbon emissions from households’ consumption in China.
Currently, there is no doubt that fewer in-site studies have concerned herdsman livelihoods in plateau regions with low urbanization levels, which may also be potentially affected by rapid urbanization in the future. The ecosystems of forests, grasslands, wetlands, and permafrost in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau are the important carbon sinks which will play a long-term, crucial role in achieving global carbon neutrality. As a natural barrier, the unique environment of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau requires the development of corresponding sustainable development strategies to achieve the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [
10]. However, it is not easy to develop such suitable and effective strategies for the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau due to its fragile environment as the “Third Pole” region in the world. The difference between this “Third Pole” and other polar regions on the earth is that this region is constantly threatened by urbanization [
11]. The population of the Tibet Plateau is rapid rising along with the development of regional economies, and the related increasing exhaust gases emissions resulting from household energy combustion (such as heating, cooking, electricity, etc.) in this region not only threaten local air quality and human health, but also hinder progress in achieving the goal of carbon-peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060 in Qinghai–Tibet. However, neither governance nor academia have paid long-term attention to this carbon issue for plateau regions, resulting in less relevant research to date [
10].
Rising carbon emissions have already threatened sustainable development in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. A household investigation in the Qinghai Province concluded that there is significant population aggregation and economic development within the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Previous studies found that household-related carbon emissions have increased at an average annual rate of 23% for the period 2002 to 2012. However, these studies only acquired an insights into carbon emissions related to urban households at the provincial level [
12], and they failed to provide further information about herdsman livelihoods in typical plateau regions. The pastoral communities, especially those living in the higher altitude of Asia, are increasingly exposed to threats brought about by the aforementioned climactic and anthropogenic factors, and thus their livelihoods are more vulnerable to climate change compared with those in the urban and rural areas in lower altitudes. These herder households making up pastoral communities have largely been dependent on their local knowledge in managing their daily livelihoods [
13]. In terms of energy consumption, over the past thousand years, local herders have preferred livestock manure (e.g., yak, sheep, etc.) and crop residues as their main energy sources [
14], and they usually lack the means for adopting clean energy to reduce household carbon emissions. As for energy saving for climate change mitigation, their external dependency has been increased due to recent climatic anomalies and economic development, which should be addressed and guided by practitioners and policy makers to better reduce household carbon emissions for the adaptation of regional climate change. However, there exists a significant gap between the energy consumption per capita of herders and that of non-herders within Qinghai Province. The aforementioned factors might lead to different situations for the dynamic carbon emissions and their driving factors in herder households. To address this emerging question—whether the carbon emissions of herder households are high enough to form a significant carbon source that has a negative impact on the low-carbon development of the plateau—this study took the Sanjiangyuan region of the Qinghai Province as an example, and analyzed the characteristics of the carbon emissions of herder households though a door-to-door household survey across different counties, aiming to provide scientific support for the overall Qinghai–Tibet Plateau to achieve the relevant carbon goals and sustainable development goals.
2. Literature Review
In recent years, the research topic of household carbon emissions has gradually attracted more academic attention. The existing research has mainly focused on the accounting of household carbon emissions in urban and rural communities and analyzing the relevant factors impacting these carbon emissions. Most studies have highlighted the importance of families as the basic units of society in carbon emission reductions; however, in the plateau regions, the role of herder households in carbon emission reductions remains unclear. It is essential to investigate this issue to gain further insights, since there exist differences between the family lifestyles of herder households and those of urban and rural residents. Previously, Jiang et al. (2020) [
3] studied the characteristics of household energy consumption levels in the agricultural and pastoral areas of the Qinghai Province, and they proposed that the limited data retrieved from official statistics were not enough to explain the regional differences [
15] and that local surveys were needed to address this issue. Zhang et al. (2020) [
16] studied the internal changes in household consumption levels and related carbon emissions based on a field survey, but they neglected herder families in the plateau regions. Further, the factors of household characteristics usually play an important role in explaining the dynamics of household carbon emissions. Zhang et al. (2023) [
17] found that household sizes in China have significant negative impacts on per capita household carbon emissions, and the negative impact on indirect carbon emissions is much greater than that on direct carbon emissions. Zhou et al. (2023) [
18] found that the impact of national population aging on carbon emissions presented an inverted U-shaped relationship, which showed that aging first increased and then decreased the related carbon emissions. Zhou et al. (2016) [
19] found that the impact of changing age structures on energy use was not statistically significant, but it led to an increase in emissions across the country, especially in eastern China. Xu et al. (2016) [
20] found that food consumption was the second largest source of carbon emissions in China. Peng et al. (2023) [
4] found that household income and consumption played important roles in promoting China’s carbon emissions, and the proportion of income-based household emissions in the total emissions was higher than that of consumption-based emissions. Golley et al. (2012) [
21] mentioned that rich households generated more emissions per capita than those emitted by poor households. Akrofi et al. (2023) [
22] mentioned that the promotion of renewable energy technologies such as solar home systems (SHS) had great potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental satisfaction levels of households have also been proposed to have positive impacts on reducing carbon emissions [
23,
24,
25].
In terms of a driving force analysis of household carbon emissions, statistical analysis techniques have been adopted to target this issue, including regression analysis and decomposition analysis [
26]. However, these methods have been mainly used for variable analyses [
27,
28], predictions [
29], and decompositions [
8] and they performed weakly in addressing the multicollinearity problems that arise while handling non-normally distributed data, and so optimal scale regression analysis has been proposed to be more practical for analyzing questionnaire data. It can be used to perform integrated analyses for multiple types of questionnaire data sources, and it has the advantage of being able to gradually remove variables that fail the significance test with high collinearity [
30,
31,
32]. As the “Third Pole” region in the world, the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau’s ecosystems are relatively fragile and more sensitive to climate change. As mentioned, studies concerning carbon emission reductions in herder households in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau are meaningful to this research field [
3,
33]. Currently, relevant research based on first-hand data retrieved from local surveys is limited, and therefore, an investigation based on large-scale household surveys would, indeed, help to further outline the carbon emissions related to herder livelihoods compared with previous work based on a limited number of questionnaires in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau [
7]. Further, through the acquisition of household scale micro-data, we could estimate regional household carbon emissions using the scaling-up method, and provide scientific support for the launch of regional low-carbon strategies, which could not be achieved by previous large-scale studies that relied on national and provincial statistics.
5. Discussion
Compared with other studies that relied on modeling, this study carried out a widespread analysis of household carbon emissions based on local widespread surveys, which could provide further insight into the relationships between carbon emissions and herder households. After all, official statistics for herder households have not been developed as well as those for urban and rural households outside of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Further, the carbon issues of herder households have attracted less attention from researchers. Zhang et al. (2023) [
49] found that with improvements in living standards, the per capita carbon emissions of non-urban households nearly exceeded those of urban households, based on the differences between the carbon emissions of urban and rural households in thirty provinces in China. Qu et al. (2013) [
50] investigated the household carbon emissions in the cold and arid regions of northwestern China, and their results indicated that herder households in high-altitude highlands potentially exhibited the higher personal carbon emissions. Further, Xian et al. (2019) [
51] revealed that with advancements in the China Western Development Strategy policy, energy consumption in the Western plateau region was producing a more severe problem of high-intensity exhaust emissions than the Eastern coastal areas. Zhang et al. (2023) [
16] found that the per capita carbon emissions of pastoral households in Tibetan areas still were lower than those of the whole country; however, they would be continuously increased with improvements in living standards, which could not be neglected. The aforementioned studies all proposed that the individual carbon emissions of urban and rural households were not consistently greater than those of herder households in some cases. The contributions of carbon emissions from herder households to regional carbon emissions cannot be ignored. This study substantially supported the abovementioned viewpoints based on wide-spread field investigations, and it provides a new perspective for understanding the impacts of herder households on climate change.
Concerning the differences between direct and indirect carbon emissions, we suggested that household carbon reductions should not merely focus on household energy savings, but also addresses the importance of shifting to low-carbon behaviors for herder households. For example, the carbon emissions generated by the life-cycles of food consumption accounted for the largest proportion of household emissions, and therefore, moderate reductions in meat consumption could reduce carbon footprints during household dining [
52,
53]. Despite this, may be difficult for the ethnic minorities of herder households to adopt lighter diets without the meat of yak and sheep, since the diets of Tibetans and other ethnic groups, including Huis, Salas, and Mongolians, have long relied on meat consumption. However, the waste production during meat consumption could be reduced, which, to some extent, would contribute to both direct and indirect carbon reductions. Our findings further confirmed that larger household sizes contributed to reductions in personal carbon emissions, which may be attributable to the positive impacts of larger families on food waste reductions. The relevant studies conducted by Song et al. [
54], Song et al. [
55], and Zhang et al. [
56] directly or indirectly support this viewpoint. Meanwhile, this study found a negative correlation between grazing prohibitions and personal household emissions. On the one hand, the governmental promotions of grazing prohibitions have raised awareness about environmental protections, which have guided the herdsmen to embrace more greener lifestyles with less consumption of fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil energies during their residential livelihoods, therefore resulting in lower household carbon emissions. On the other hand, the scale and range of livestock grazing are limited by official grazing prohibitions, and the fossil and non-fossil energy consumption levels related to animal husbandry have been reduced.
It is undeniable that this study had limitations, and they limited our ability to further understand household carbon emissions in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. In future, the number of questionnaires during the on-site surveys could be increased to cover more counties located in other plateau regions within the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. In addition, the frequency of the surveys could be appropriately increased to two or more times in one year, aiming to reveal the seasonal responses of household consumption to climate change. These elements would strengthen the objectivity of the statistical results and improve the ability of the relevant analyses to elucidate the roles of herder households in climate change mitigation.