Elsevier

Building and Environment

Volume 92, October 2015, Pages 418-431
Building and Environment

CO2 emissions of China's commercial and residential buildings: Evidence and reduction policy

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2015.05.020Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Electricity is the main source of CO2 emissions in China's building sector.

  • Residents' income is a dominant factor of the increases in CO2 emissions.

  • Energy efficiency improvement contributes the most to CO2 mitigation.

  • Population migration results in an increase in CO2 emissions in the urban areas.

Abstract

This paper provides an assessment of the potential of CO2 mitigation in buildings by conducting an empirical research on the determinants of building energy-related CO2 emissions. The building sector accounts for 30%–50% of CO2 emissions and thus has significant impacts on global warming. This paper fills the research gap by investigating the economic factors that determine energy-related CO2 emissions in China's commercial and residential buildings. Based on provincial data, a three-dimensional LMDI decomposition of building energy-related CO2 emissions into four components is proposed, and includes scale, income, intensity and structure effects. The results suggest that: (i) China's building energy-related CO2 emissions are increasing rapidly; (ii) The improvement in living standards is the leading driving force of the increases in emissions, but its importance diminishes due to energy efficiency improvement and transformation to low-carbon energy structure; (iii) The evolution of China's commercial building energy-related CO2 emissions shows the features of the environmental Kuznets curve; (iv) CO2 emissions would further increase in the developed eastern regions due to large-scale migration from rural to urban areas.

Introduction

China is currently experiencing rapid industrialization and urbanization alongside high economic growth. Low-carbon economy has become a sustainable development strategy to alleviate energy and environmental problems, and is expected as an inevitable trend of human development in the future. However, without government's well-adjusted plans and polices, low-carbon economy cannot be achieved through self-evolution of market mechanisms. One of the main reasons is that the choice for eco-friendlier behavior is in fact a public goods game. On the side of each individual and the industry, there are gains to be made in profit by neglecting sustainability and the environment, while in terms of the public good, most notably the environment, these public goods could be lost due to selfish incentives and ignoring cleaner production or lifestyle. Many researches addressed such social dilemmas by using theoretical models, among which the evolutionary game theory is widely recommended as a competent part [1]. The evolutionary game theory was first proposed by Lewontin and formally analyzed as “strategies” with mathematical criteria and tools by Smith [2], [3]. The idea originates from the Darwinian biological evolutionism and defines a framework of competing strategies that differs from classical game theories by focusing more on the evolutionary dynamics. It also loosens the essential assumption in classical game theories, that all the players are making their strategic choices wholly rationally. With continuous development, the evolutionary game theory is increasingly applied not only for its original purpose but also to economics and sociology. Perc and Szolnoki indicated that coevolutionary rules should simultaneously be subject to evolution games besides the evolution of strategies to fully exploit the benefits offered by cooperative behavior [4]. The authors have done tremendous work organizing and reviewing recent advances on evolutionary games incorporating coevolutionary rules. Further, they focused on the public goods game and structured populations, and presented a comprehensive review of recent works on the evolutionary dynamic of group interactions [5]. Gilboa and Matsui introduced this theory into economics. It is currently prevalent in the field of carbon emissions [6]. Yang constructed an evolutionary game model to analyze carbon emissions quotas between developed and developing countries [7]. Li studied how government and manufacturers chose their action and how they interacted with each other in order to achieve low-carbon development [8]. The findings have proved the dilemmas in terms of carbon emissions. Some other relevant studies in terms of environmental issues and the revolutionary game theory include Wang et al. [9], Barari et al. [10], Dai et al. [11], Zhu et al. [12], Wang et al. [13]. Even in other empirical studies with different methods such as Bao et al. [14], Guo and Wang [15], Chen [16], Cao [17]. It is also indicated that well-adjusted plans and policies can promote lower CO2 emissions.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions caused by building energy consumption are of great importance to achieve low-carbon development due to its large and increasing size. About 30%–40% of the world energy consumption and 1/4 of greenhouse gas emissions come from the building sector. CO2 from fossil fuel combustion accounts for nearly 60% of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and has been widely regarded as the leading contributor to climate change [18], [19]. China became the biggest CO2 emitter in the world in 2008, due to its rapid industrialization and urbanization, out of which the building sector contributes about 1/3 of its total energy consumption and results in about 30%–40% of total CO2 emissions [20], [21]. Furthermore, China's urbanization rate might increase to 70% by 2030, indicating that about 300 million people would migrate to urban areas [22]. Meanwhile, per capita housing area and income in the urban areas are expected to be 44 m2 and 60 thousand RMB respectively [23]. Building energy consumption increases with the urbanization process and improvement in living standard. It is forecasted that 35% of China's final energy will be used in the building sector by 2030 [24]. Thus, CO2 reduction in China's building sector is believed to be one of the central issues in dealing with global warming.

Compared with other sectors, the building sector has particular characteristics in energy use and carbon emission in different stages of its life-cycle – including building material preparation, building construction, building operation, building demolition, and material wastes disposal. Many studies such as [25], [26] have measured energy consumption and environmental impacts of buildings and its related sectors using Life-Cycle Assessments (LCAs). The LCAs provide an overview of the building sector's energy use and emissions, but the results vary across regions and sample periods due to the lack of a unified model and standards for assessment. Furthermore, the LCAs need large amounts of complex basic data, some of which have to be estimated, and thus leading to a strong subjectivity disadvantage. Therefore, it is necessary to obtain a detailed and comparable understanding of building energy use and emissions by focusing on a certain stage of the life-cycle, particularly for the purpose of strengthening current building energy efficiency policies. For example, Ouyang and Lin predicted the electricity conservation potential in China's building materials industry [27]. Yan et al. studied GHG emissions in building construction in Hong Kong [28]. Compared to other stages, building operation, which is usually narrowly defined as the building sector, has received more attention since it accounts for 60%–80% of the total life cycle of building energy consumption and carbon emissions.1 This paper makes efforts to explore the determinants of building energy-related CO2 emissions in China, by focusing on the building operation stage of the life cycle.

Li reviewed the existing approaches applied to formulate the prospects of energy use and CO2 emissions in China's buildings, and addressed a low-carbon future in China's building operation sector [24]. Dietz et al. adopted a behavioral approach to investigate the reasonably achievable potential for near-term reductions in US homes [29]. Long et al. pointed out that the carbon emissions of a building was essentially from its occupants and thus the intensity index should be accepted for evaluating carbon emissions from buildings [30]. Qin and Qi discussed the impact of urban form on reducing carbon emissions in buildings based on survey data collected from Beijing, China [31]. Onat constructed a dynamic model to find the best policy options that could stabilize the exponentially increasing trend of energy-related GHG emissions stock in the US residential buildings [32]. The results indicated that only two of the proposed nineteen policies were helpful. Tettey et al. found that 6%–8% of CO2 emissions in the reference buildings could be reduced by changing the insulation materials [33]. La Rosa et al. carried out an environmental analysis for buildings applications and they found the environmental performance to be lower when eco-sandwich is used [34]. Lin and Liu estimated the energy conservation potential in China's buildings and measured the rebound effect of energy efficiency in China's residential buildings [20], [35]. Sun et al. analyzed the characteristics of target policies in terms of low-carbon emissions from buildings in China and proposed a policy scheme from 2015 to 2050, considering the factors of different buildings, stages and policies [36].

Previous literatures have contributed sufficiently to the building sector's energy saving and emission mitigation. Most of them suggested physical solutions such as improving building envelop, promoting insulation and efficient heating-and-cooling systems, etc. In fact, building energy efficiency and emission mitigation policies should be more concerned with economic factors and from an economic operation scheme. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the implementation of building energy efficiency policies by presenting an improved and comprehensive understanding of the determinants of energy-related CO2 emissions in China's commercial and residential buildings using a decomposition approach. To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring the economic factors that affect energy-related CO2 emissions in buildings. This does not only benefit the improvement of building efficiency policies, but it is also conductive for emission mitigation in China and globally.

In this paper, the change in China's building energy-related CO2 emission is decomposed into four economic determinants with ten variables, e.g., energy structure, energy intensity, income, capital stock, population. The results of different building sub-sectors in different regions are further compared. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly presents the methodologies of our study and constructs a LMDI decomposition model of China's building energy-related CO2 emission changes. Section 3 estimates energy-related CO2 emissions in China's commercial and residential buildings and decomposes their changes into ten influential factors. Section 4 further discusses building energy-related CO2 emissions in different sub-sectors and regions. Finally, some concluding remarks and policy implications are summarized in Section 5.

Section snippets

LMDI decomposition

The Index Decomposition Analysis (IDA) is widely used in investigating changes in CO2 emissions, and is particularly suitable for decomposition models with less variables or time series data [37]. It attributes the changes in CO2 emissions from Period 0 to Period t to the product of several influential factors. The changes in the factors over the two periods are taken as their contributions [38]. Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) is the most common form of IDA. Literatures have argued that

Estimation of building energy-related CO2 emissions

Fig. 1 shows

Further discussions

In Section 3, the energy-related CO2 emissions in the building sectors at the national level are discussed. It should be noted that energy-related behaviors in commercial buildings are different from those in residential buildings. Even within residential buildings, there is substantial difference between urban and rural areas. Furthermore, the economic development and resources endowment in China vary across regions. In order to investigate China's buildings energy-related carbon emissions in

Conclusions

Due to its large energy consumption and CO2 emissions, the building sector plays a major role in dealing with global warming, and is generally becoming one of the central issues of energy and environmental policies for CO2 mitigation. Many researches have been conducted to investigate the factors determining building energy demands and CO2 emissions. Most of these literatures consider building materials or building design as the main contributors and thus suggest improving building energy

Acknowledgments

This paper is supported by Newhuadu Business School Research Fund, Social Science Fundation (Grant No. 12&ZD059, and 14JZD031), and Ministry of Education (Grant No. 10JBG013).

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