Effects of household energy consumption on environment and its influence factors in rural and urban areas

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the current situation and environmental effects of household energy consumption in rural and urban areas. We suggest some measures on reducing emission and protecting environment from pollution. Based on questionnaires survey, we analyzed the quantity and structure of household energy consumption in urban and rural areas, and compared the environmental effects of energy use between urban and rural areas. We used SPIRPAT model to analyze the impact of population and income factors on the ecological footprint of energy use. The results show that there is an unobvious difference of per capita energy consumption between areas. But in terms of energy structure, urban households are dominated by the fossil energy, while rural households are dominated by both of biomass energy and fossil fuels. The emissions of rural households are much larger than those of urban households. However, the difference of social emissions from energy consumption between urban and rural households becomes little. Both population size and income factors have promoting effect on total energy and the ecological footprints of electricity and coal etc. in urban areas, so does on electricity and biomass in rural areas.