Revealing the Historical Peak Situation of CO2 Emissions from Buildings in the Great Bay Area

Understanding the historical peak situation and the rules for CO2 emissions from buildings helps to formulate reasonable building mitigation strategies, accelerating the achievement of the Chinese government’s carbon peak goal. As developed regions, cities in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Great Bay Area (GBA) provide valuable reference cases. This study quantified the historical building CO2 emissions of GBA cities and analyzed the contribution of driving factors using the Kaya identity and logarithmic mean Divisia index. Furthermore, we assessed the historical peak situation using the MK trend test method and discussed the reasons behind the inter-city difference in the peak situation shown by the environmental Kuznets curve. The results indicate that the building-related CO2 emissions of the GBA will slowly increase to 96.90 Mt CO2 by 2020 and that P&C buildings accounted for a larger proportion of emissions. Emission factors and population made the largest positive and negative contributions, respectively, to this total. At the city level, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong ranked as the top three sources of building CO2 emissions. Hong Kong peaked, Dongguan and Macao plateaued, and other cities maintained either slow or quick growth. CO2 emissions unit area, per capita building CO2 emissions, and building CO2 emissions reached a peak in that order. This study provides a valuable reference for formulating a city-level path showing building CO2 emissions peaks.