The climate opportunities and risks of improving building envelopes across 1,677 Chinese cities

<h2>Summary</h2> The global building sector consumes approximately 30% of final energy, making it crucial for climate change mitigation and adaptation. International calls for enhancing building energy efficiencies are growing, focusing on strategies such as energy-efficient building envelopes through renovation and replacement of older structures, along with electrification and fuel switching. However, the energy-saving potential of these improvements remains uncertain due to the complex interplay of building stock characteristics and climatic conditions. Here, we diagnose the compound effects of envelope improvements and climate change on China's housing energy demand using a physics-based building energy model with fine spatial and temporal granularity, covering 1,677 sub-province-level cities. Our model shows that envelope improvements play very different roles in ameliorating climate change impacts on housing energy use across the country, highlighting the need for building climate-resilient energy supply and pursuing alternative energy efficiency strategies in less climate-resilient regions.

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Publication Details

Journal
Cell Reports Sustainability
Published
2024-12-01
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crsus.2024.100269
Citations
8
Primary Topic
Building Energy and Comfort Optimization
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
2.12

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article

The climate opportunities and risks of improving building envelopes across 1,677 Chinese cities

Lixiao Zhang, Zhi Cao, Peter Berrill, Chaofeng Shao et al.
8 citations
Cell Reports Sustainability
Building Energy and Comfort Optimization
2.12
article

The climate opportunities and risks of improving building envelopes across 1,677 Chinese cities

Lixiao Zhang, Zhi Cao, Peter Berrill, Chaofeng Shao, Nuoa Lei, Xiaoyang Zhong, Rui Jing, Chunli Chu, Eric Masanet, Mengyuan Dang, Paul Behrens, Yufei Zhang, Meiting Ju, Weiqiang Chen, Lirong Liu, Hongyuan Jia
article en
8 citations

Abstract

<h2>Summary</h2> The global building sector consumes approximately 30% of final energy, making it crucial for climate change mitigation and adaptation. International calls for enhancing building energy efficiencies are growing, focusing on strategies such as energy-efficient building envelopes through renovation and replacement of older structures, along with electrification and fuel switching. However, the energy-saving potential of these improvements remains uncertain due to the complex interplay of building stock characteristics and climatic conditions. Here, we diagnose the compound effects of envelope improvements and climate change on China's housing energy demand using a physics-based building energy model with fine spatial and temporal granularity, covering 1,677 sub-province-level cities. Our model shows that envelope improvements play very different roles in ameliorating climate change impacts on housing energy use across the country, highlighting the need for building climate-resilient energy supply and pursuing alternative energy efficiency strategies in less climate-resilient regions.

Cell Reports SustainabilityVol. 1(12)
Leiden University (NL), International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (AT), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US), University of California, Santa Barbara (US), Chongqing University of Science and Technology (CN), Xiamen University (CN), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN), Nankai University (CN), Beijing Normal University (CN), University of Surrey (GB), University of Oxford (GB), Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (DE), Institute of Urban Environment (CN), State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control (CN), Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SG), Technische Universität Berlin (DE)
National Natural Science Foundation of China, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, National Social Science Fund of China
Climate action
Openalex Percentile: Top 13%
Building Energy and Comfort Optimization
2.12
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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