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

Zhang, Y., Dang, M., Chu, C., Behrens, P., Berrill, P., Zhong, X., Jing, R., Lei, N., Jia, H., Zhang, L., Shao, C., Masanet, E., Ju, M., Liu, L., Chen, W., & Cao, Z. (2024). The climate opportunities and risks of improving building envelopes across 1,677 Chinese cities. Cell Reports Sustainability 1 (12) e100269. 10.1016/j.crsus.2024.100269.

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Abstract

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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