A Systematic Study on Embodied Carbon Emissions in the Materialization Phase of Residential Buildings: Indicator Assessment Based on Life Cycle Analysis and STIRPAT Modeling

Against the backdrop of intensifying global climate change and advancing the goal of the “dual-carbon” strategy, the built environment is being viewed as a complex socio-technical system in which technological, economic, demographic and institutional subsystems are coupled and evolving at different scales. As a core node in this system, residential buildings not only carry infrastructural functions, but are also deeply embedded in energy flows, material cycles and behavioural structures, which have a significant impact on carbon emissions. Given the high volume of residential buildings in China and the significant differences between urban and rural construction, there is an urgent need to systematically identify and analyse the implicit carbon emissions during the materialisation phase. In this paper, from the perspective of systems engineering, we selected 30 urban and rural residential buildings in provinces and cities from 2005 to 2020 as the research objects, adopted the life cycle assessment (LCA) method to account for the implied carbon emissions in the materialisation stage, and systematically identified the driving factors of carbon emissions based on the Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology (STIRPAT) model. From this study, we made the following conclusions: (1) the total carbon emissions of residential buildings in urban and rural areas in China continue to rise during the materialisation stage, showing a spatial pattern of “high in the south-east and low in the north-west”, with a significant trend of structural transformation in urban and rural areas and with steel–concrete structures dominating in towns and cities, and bricks and steel being used in rural areas. (2) Resident population and disposable income are generally positive driving factors, while the influence of industrial structure and energy intensity is heterogeneous between urban and rural areas. For overall residential buildings, every 1% increase in resident population and income will lead to a 1.055% and 0.73% increase in carbon emissions, respectively. The study shows that life-cycle-oriented carbon accounting and the identification of multidimensional driving mechanisms are of great policy value in developing urban–rural differentiated emission reduction paths and enhancing the effectiveness of carbon management in the building sector.