Carbon And Water Footprints Of Tibet: Spatial Pattern And Management Measures Analysis

In the context of coping with global change,the carbon footprint and water footprint of regional development have increasingly become the important basis for relevant policy formulation.As the world’s largest carbon emitter and a country with severe water shortage,it is imperative for China to advocate the implementation of lowcarbon economy and build a water-friendly society.Tibet of China has extremely fragile natural ecosystem,which is under great pressure of global changes.Carbon and water footprints,reflecting pressures of regional development on natural environment,are lack of study for Tibet due to missing data.In this paper,multi-regional input-output table of China is employed to quantify the carbon and water footprints of Tibet and the relationship between Tibet and other provinces of China.Spatial pattern and key sectors are also studied to demonstrate and character the current and future of footprints of Tibet.The results indicates that water footprint per capita of Tibet was 956.8 t in 2012,higher than the national average 424.7 t,while carbon footprint per capita of Tibet was 4.0 t in 2012,lower than the national average 8.0 t.Local water consumption was 2.4 Gt,or the equivalent of 91.2% of the water footprint,while local carbon emissions were 4.0 Mt,or the equivalent of 32.7% of the carbon footprint,indicating Tibet was a net importing region of carbon emissions.Tibet received embodied carbon emissions by trade from other 30 provinces,especially from Hebei,Inner Mongolia and Henan provinces,but played a complex role in virtual water trade by transferring to most provinces and receiving from some provinces,such as Shandong,Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces.In addition,based on the data of GDP,carbon emission and water consumption coefficient of Tibet,this study also made a scenario analysis of the carbon and water footprint of Tibet,and the results showed that,the carbon footprint of Tibet will increase under different scenarios of 2030,but the water footprint can be restricted to 2.5 Gt in the low growth scenario.