Assessing the burning of household dung-cake as an energy source in different rangeland regions of Inner Mongolia

Burning of livestock dung as a fuel by herdsman households, representing one of the most critical determinants of biogeochemical cycle, has been a tradition for thousands of years in most rangeland regions worldwide. It has been suggested that returning livestock dung to pasture instead of burning them as fuel would benefit ecosystem health and carbon sequestration in rangelands. However, evidence-based studies on the driving factors of household dung-cake collection and burning in various rangeland regions are limited. Using a stratified random sampling approach, we did a household survey on the herders’ behaviors of dung-cake collection and burning, and investigated their relations with climate, availability of other energy sources, and household socioeconomic conditions, across the five rangeland regions in Inner Mongolia on August–November 2015. We found that the energy from dung-cake burning accounted for 34.90% of the total household energy consumption for cooking and heating, and it varied considerably across rangeland regions. The amount of dung-cake energy use in a household mainly depends on the length of cold period in a year (defined as the number of days with mean daily temperature below 5 °C), indicating dung-cake burning is a major and contingent way of heating in the long winter period in Inner Mongolia. Moreover, the reduction in the cold period but not availability of other energy sources can reduce the proportion of dung-cake energy in total household energy consumption. Reducing the quantity of dung collected and burnt by herders is promoted for both enhancing carbon sink capacity of rangeland ecosystems and improving indoor environmental quality of pastoral households. Our findings have important implications for understanding how ecological and socioeconomic factors affect household dung-cake use as fuel, and for developing low-carbon energy infrastructures and novel energy policies to facilitate the use of low-carbon energy sources for the benefit of carbon sequestration and environment.