CO2 mitigation model for China's residential building sector

TL;DR

This study analyzes the factors influencing CO2 reduction in China's residential sector from 2001 to 2016, highlighting key economic indicators and strategies that effectively mitigated emissions at the household level.

Contribution

It introduces a decomposition analysis model to assess CO2 mitigation in China's residential buildings, filling a gap in retrospective emission measurement.

Findings

CO2 intensity decreased due to housing economic factors and emission factors

Total CMRBS from 2001-2016 was 1816.99 MtCO2

Energy conservation strategies significantly increased mitigation effects

Abstract

This paper aims 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. 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.