19. Current Approaches for Embodied Carbon Assessment of Buildings in China: An Overview

In China, the building sector, as a pillar industry of China’s modern economy, plays a vital role in generating carbon emissions, which is responsible for about 40% of the national total carbon emissions. To provide insights into the current carbon assessment practice of buildings in China, this chapter conducted an overview of current policies and industry initiatives promulgated for building carbon reduction and approaches currently being used to assess embodied carbon of buildings in China. To address the issues that are related to quantify embodied carbon of buildings under different scales, this chapter introduces assessment approaches and uncertainty analysis methods from both the macro and micro perspectives. The results show that the current focus of China is still on the buildings’ operational carbon reduction rather than the embodied phase. Such policy orientation does not match the increasing role of embodied carbon reduction in the creation of sustainability in the building sector. In China, the single-region input-output analysis (SRIO), multiregional input-output analysis (MRIO), and structural path analysis (SPA) are commonly used to assess embodied carbon at the macro level, while the process-based and hybrid LCA models are dominant in micro-level analysis. Although the process-based approach is most frequently used for embodied carbon assessment of buildings, a clear trend can be observed that the relevant studies gradually shift their focus from process-based individual cases to a more hybrid and macro sense in China.