Volume 7: Urban Energy Systems: Building, Transport, Environment, Industry, and Integration

CO2 Mitigation Model for China’s Residential Building Sector Minda Ma* , Weiguang Cai*

Abstract

Carbon-dioxide mitigation in residential building sector (CMRBS) has become critical for China in achieving its emission mitigation goal in the “Post Paris” period with the growing demand for household energy service in residential buildings. This is the first paper to investigate the factors that can mitigate carbon-dioxide (CO2) intensity and further assess CMRBS in China based on a household scale via decomposition analysis. Here we show that: Three types of housing economic indicators and the final emission factor significantly contributed to the decrease in CO2 intensity in the residential building sector. In addition, the CMRBS from 2001–2016 was 1816.99 MtCO2, and the average mitigation intensity during this period was 266.12 kgCO2 · (household · year)-1. Furthermore, the energy-conservation and emission-mitigation strategy caused CMRBS to effectively increase and is the key to promoting a more significant emission mitigation in the future. Overall, this paper covers the CMRBS assessment gap in China, and the proposed assessment model can be regarded as a reference for other countries and cities for measuring the retrospective CO2 mitigation effect in residential buildings.

Keywords CO2 mitigation; CO2 intensity; Residential building; Decomposition analysis; Emission mitigation strategy.