Uncovering the effects of policies, climate, and economic development on carbon neutrality in southern Tibet, China

Abstract Partitioning the contributions of climate, economic growth, and policy to a region’s carbon flows is an important process for the Chinese government seeking to optimize their regional development policies to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. A combination of the carbon emission analysis and human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) framework was applied to a village in the Lhasa river valley, Tibet, to quantify the contributions of these different factors to carbon flows and neutrality. From 2010 to 2019, the average annual net sequestration of CO2 was 374.9 g CO2 m−2 a−1. Changes in climate conditions and the regional policy of Grassland Ecological Protection Subsidy and Reward increased carbon sequestrations by 409.5 and 25.7 g CO2 m−2 a−1, respectively. Socioeconomic development, policies for reducing poverty, and promotion of forage production led to the increase in CO2 emissions by 103.5, 88.8, and 4.3 g CO2 m−2 a−1, respectively. The cumulative CO2 emissions (including HANPP) caused by land use were 298.92 Tg CO2 (2479.63 g CO2 m−2; 1 Tg = 1012 g), while the cumulative CO2 emissions due to energy use were only 11.22 Tg CO2 (93.07 g CO2 m−2), equal to 3.75% of the CO2 emissions driven by land use. Livestock grazing and cropland cultivation were the two main land use factors affecting the carbon balance. We argue that unhooking economic growth from traditional nomadic animal husbandry and lifestyles through policy optimizations would highly contribute the carbon neutrality in Tibet. Graphical Abstract