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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1513751
This article is part of the Research Topic Advancing Carbon Reduction and Pollution Control Policies Management: Theoretical, Application, and Future Impacts View all 26 articles
Assessing decarbonisation pathways in Qinghai Province, China: an analysis based on the extended STIRPAT model and data visualisation
Provisionally accepted- 1 Shaoyang University, Tangdukou, China
- 2 Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- 3 Hohai University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China
Sustainable development is widely discussed globally, and China's decarbonisation efforts, as the world's largest carbon emitter, are essential for mitigating the global greenhouse effect. Qinghai Province is an underdeveloped province in northwestern China. It has recently achieved good results in the agricultural sector but faces potential environmental pollution problems. The key motivation for this study is that earlier studies have focused only on total carbon emissions in China as a whole, with little penetration into the provinces, and in particular, minimal attention has been paid to the underdeveloped provinces in northwestern China. In this study, three carbon reduction scenarios were created to project emissions using data from Qinghai Province's 14th Five-Year Plan and Vision 2035 and were analysed using the extended STIRPAT (Stochastic Effects of Population, Affluence, and Technology Regression) model as well as Various visualisation techniques were analysed to determine the impact of population size, primary electricity application levels, GDP per capita, primary sector output, and agricultural fertiliser use on carbon emissions. We find an inverted U-curve relationship between GDPs per capita and carbon emissions, that population size is the primary driver of carbon emissions in Qinghai Province, and that the vigorous development of primary electricity will effectively alleviate the carbon emissions problem. If strict environmental protection measures are implemented, Qinghai Province can reach the peak carbon target in 2030, meeting China's 2030 peak carbon target. Using these results, this study can provide recommendations for policymakers in Qinghai Province to ensure their environmental goals are met.
Keywords: data analysis, relationship analytics, Decarbonisation pathways, environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, CO2 emission, sustainability, visual analysis
Received: 19 Oct 2024; Accepted: 24 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Hua and Chi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jie Hua, Macquarie University, Sydney, 2109, New South Wales, Australia
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