Potential and roadmap of CO2 emission reduction in urban buildings: Case study of Shenzhen

Abstract

Buildings play an increasingly important role to determine the trend of CO2 emissions in cities. Whether CO2 emissions from buildings can be effectively mitigated has great significance for cities to achieve climate governance goals. The study takes Shenzhen, a China's megacity, as an example to examine how the penetration of newly emerging clean technologies and consumer-to-prosumer role transition of buildings will contribute to CO2 emission reductions. Based on a Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP) model, the major results indicate that CO2 emissions of Shenzhen's building sector could be capped by 2022–2025 and substantially decreased by more than 60% by 2030. Accelerating energy efficiency retrofitting of existing buildings and enforcing stricter design standards on new buildings could largely reduce CO2 emissions, but still unable to prevent them from growing. The intensification of building energy-saving management and promotion of distributed renewable energy use would bring additional potentials of emission reduction, enabling a peak-reaching and a rapid downward trend of building emissions. To achieve the potentials, close cooperation and synergic efforts between multiple stakeholders are advocated for establishing intelligent energy-saving management systems, decarbonizing urban power supply, and popularizing distributed rooftop photovoltaic power stations.