Abstract
As an essential factor for sustainable development, energy plays a very important role in sustaining a modern lifestyle, particularly in poor rural areas. Considering that farmers’ livelihood in such areas is enormously dependent on services provided by environmental resources, it makes sense to investigate the relationships and interactions between farming households’ livelihood strategies and their energy consumption. The findings and outcomes would be expected to contribute to the body of knowledge and benefit local policy-making toward sustainable transformation in the long run. Taking Gannan as an example, this study employed a participatory rural appraisal approach, with first-hand data mainly from field surveys, using a stratified random sampling method to illustrate the influence of farmers’ livelihood strategies for household energy consumption in the eastern Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, China. Seven townships in Gannan were covered, three of them in pure pastoral areas, two in farming-pastoral areas, and two in farming areas. From these, 230 households were selected as study samples, with a valid return of 217 questionnaires, among which 78 came from pure pastoral areas, 60 from farming-pastoral areas, and 79 from farming areas. The results show that livelihood has a significant impact on farmers’ household energy consumption patterns, and increasing family income level and education level and improving the availability of commodity energy resources will help farmers reduce the proportion of biomass energy consumption and increase the proportion of commodity energy consumption. Furthermore, measures such as developing nonagricultural industries, improving the energy infrastructure, and enhancing farmers’ energy-saving awareness should be seriously considered to optimize farmers’ living energy consumption patterns in these poverty-stricken and eco-frangible regions.
Highlights
Energy is an essential factor for sustainable development
The proportion of pure farming households in pure pastoral areas, farming-pastoral areas, and farming areas declined to 52.21%, 28.33%, and 15.18% respectively, while the proportion of nonfarming households increased steadily to 7.66%, 18.34%, and 40.49%, respectively
The characteristics of the households with different livelihoods were different; for example, pure farming households (PFH) had an average family size of about 5.14 persons/household, and the proportion of males was 54.76%; the labor force had about 2.78 laborers/household, and only 5.6% of family members graduated from senior school or above; the family size of households with combined occupations (HCO) and nonfarming households (NFH) was about 5.39 and 5.20 persons/household respectively, and the proportion of males was 51.06% and 49.33%, respectively, family members who graduated from senior school and above in these two households accounted for 9.5% and 11.4%, respectively, and there were about 3.02 and 2.98 laborers/household (Table 1)
Summary
Energy is an essential factor for sustainable development. In the United Nations (UN, New York, NY, USA) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Sustainable Development Goal 7 (SDG7) is to “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all”. A third of the world’s population, about 2.5 billion people, rely on the traditional use of biomass to cook their meals, and 1.65 billion people (43% of the population) in developing Asia rely on biomass for cooking, which represents an increase of 160 million people since 2000 [2]. These biomass fuels include firewood, charcoal, dung, and agricultural residues; in many cases, the demand for biomass fuels far outweighs the sustainable supply, resulting in deforestation, land degradation, and desertification [3]. The environmental income is important for all livelihood strategy groups in Nepal, conservation policies and natural resource management are critical to sustain the increased demands and reliance of local livelihoods on environmental products and services in Nepal [6]
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