68. A Review of Carbon Accounting Models for Urban Building Sector

Global warming caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emission has become a common concern in the international community. Building sector is one of the major areas to produce GHG emissions. There are a lot of carbon emission researches by the domestic and overseas scholars, although the international standards for carbon accounting have not been established in the building sector. In this paper, we first introduce the major modeling techniques for estimating the national or urban building energy consumption in brief. And then give an overview of urban building energy consumption and carbon emissions accounting models based on these methods, particularly describe the scale and the scope applied in the accounting, the relationships between the models, the evaluation and analysis of the existing models focused on their purposes, strengths, and shortcomings. Finally, the main part of this paper puts forward an elementary conceives to establishing a more smaller scale of carbon accounting model used the life cycle assessment (LCA) theory aim at regional building energy system. And we wish the carbon accounting model can guide the design of new regional building energy system and the retrofit of existing regional building energy system.