Empirical research on household carbon emissions characteristics and key impact factors in mining areas

Abstract

The coal-rich mining areas are a key area to deal with climate change in China, and it is of great significance to study household carbon emissions in these areas. Based on the micro family activity survey data of 3 towns and 9 townships in the Gujiao mining area in Shanxi Province, this study took the Consumer Lifestyle Approach (CLA) as the research paradigm, used descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis to process the data, and found that household carbon emissions characteristics were closely associated with specific resource endowment, household income level, education level and social development. Specifically, the residential behaviors and travel behaviors are the direct impact on household carbon emission characteristics. The residential behaviors have a significant positive correlation with household carbon emissions, in which residential electricity consumption accounted for nearly 41%. In the travel behaviors, private cars are the largest contributors to the carbon emissions from transportation, approaching 79%, followed by bus travel (13%) and motorcycle travel (8%). Then, aiming at the indirect effects of household carbon emissions, this study also set up three scenarios, and found that education level and policy regulation can effectively reduce carbon emissions, and family scale increases carbon emissions. According to the empirical results of this study, local governments should focus closely on two aspects: strengthening household energy conservation and emission reduction awareness and improving public infrastructure construction in the future.