BEIJING -- Chinese researchers have demonstrated that China's livestock industry witnessed a continuous decrease in non-CO2 greenhouse gas emission intensity from 1998 to 2016.

China's livestock sector is a main source of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, such as wetland methane, said the study paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

Decomposing the factors that influence non-CO2 greenhouse gas emission intensity in the livestock sector provides an important reference for emission reduction, according to researchers from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

They built a decomposition framework based on the concept of "environment-food-economy." The influencing factors that drove changes in the non-CO2 greenhouse gas emission intensity of the livestock sector were interpreted at the environmental, economic and scale level.

They also quantified the contributions of these three drivers in 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland from 1998 to 2016.

The results showed that the non-CO2 greenhouse gas emission intensity of the livestock sector in China decreased by 80 percent during the study period. The decrease was mainly driven by the environmental and economic factors of the livestock sector of each provincial regions with a respective contribution of about 52 percent and 34 percent.

The researchers suggested to improve the environmental and economic levels of the livestock sector in each provincial region and narrow the inter-provincial region gaps in order to further reduce the country's non-CO2 greenhouse gas emission intensity.