Critical factors of low-carbon building development in China's urban area

Abstract

The energy consumption and carbon emissions of the urban building sector have been growing so rapidly in recent decades that developing low-carbon buildings has become a common trend in the world. However, the current developing situation of low-carbon buildings in China's urban area is still dissatisfactory though some measures have been taken. Thus, it is valuable to explore the critical factors responsible for the imperfect low-carbon development. Based on the extant researches, this paper firstly concluded 18 possible factors affecting the development of low-carbon buildings in China's urban area Then, with the data collected from a questionnaire survey, 6 critical factors are identified through factor analysis. The research also employed structural equation modeling to further indicate the influence priorities of the 6 critical factors over corporate low-carbon willingness. The results show that all of these critical factors have significant impacts on low-carbon constructionand return on investment has the first priority over low-carbon willingness. Correspondingly, six proposals are proposed at the end of the paper with the aim to provide a reference for the effective development of urban low-carbon buildings. It is worthy to mention that the results are also valuable for the construction of resource saving and environmental-friendly society in China.

Introduction

The data in Global Carbon Project reveals that China becomes the largest carbon emitters in the world and China's carbon emissions related to human activities account for 29% of the total global carbon emissions. In addition, China's per capita carbon emissions (7.2 tons) surpass Europe (6.8 tons) for the first time (Zhao, 2015) though there is a long distance from the US, Australia and other developed countries. Thus, developing low-carbon economy has obviously become a new and essential trend in response to the severe situation in China. To accelerate the process of low-carbon economy, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) established two batches of low-carbon demonstration provinces and cities in July 2010 and in December 2012 respectively and highlighted that the low-carbon exemplar cities are the key construction projects. In addition, the NDRC announced a plan to develop 1000 low-carbon communities in March 2014.

Globally, the total emissions from the building sector are estimated to be one-third of the global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (Levine et al., 2007). In China, those are about 25–27% (Li, 2007) of the country's GHG emissions. The carbon dioxide generated by buildings accounts for 1/2 of the total carbon emissions which are mainly produced from the industry, transportation and construction (Jiang and Li, 2010). Meanwhile, taking the three major phases of construction, operation and demolition of a building into consideration, a comparison of the life cycle carbon emission for each stage showed that appropriately 84.5% of the total carbon emissions were generated during operation, whereas carbon emissions of construction and demolition phases accounted for 12.6% and 2% respectively (Peng, 2016). Additionally, the embodied and operating energy consumption of buildings accounted for more than 30% of the total social energy consumption in China (Zhu et al., 2014). Moreover, in China, about 15 million people that lived in rural areas before flow into the city yearly during 2000–2030 (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (2011)). The rapid process of urbanization leads to 1.6–2.0 billion square meters of new dwellings are planned to build each year (Zhang, 2010). The Chinese Ministry of Construction estimates that around 15–20 billion square meters of new buildings will be constructed by the year 2020 in order to accommodate those newcomers, which are equivalent to the entire housing stock in the EU-15 (Li and Colombier, 2009). Definitely, the incredible urbanization process will leave much room for the incessant growth of energy consumption and carbon emissions in the next decades if there are no effective measures.

As one of the most important components of a city, the construction industry has increased energy demand and excessive carbon emissions; besides, it is also considered to have considerable potential to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption. The potential can be realized by appropriate measures such as saving energy, improving energy efficiency, increasing the number of low-carbon buildings, developing the circular economy, etc. Therefore, achieving low-carbon in the construction industry is meaningful for the development of low-carbon city, low-carbon society and low-carbon economy in China. And developing low-carbon buildings to control urban carbon emissions is also the basis and premise of the construction of low-carbon city (Xu, 2012).

The concept of low-carbon building originated from the low-carbon economy proposed by the British government in 2003, and there is no clear definition in academia yet. In the Evaluation Standard of Low-carbon Buildings, enacted by Chongqing Municipal Commission of Urban-Rural Development (2012), low-carbon building was described as a building designed and engineered to optimize carbon emission performance by reducing carbon source and increasing carbon sink in the process of planning, design, construction, operation, demolition and recycling. It also formed an index system including five indicators: low-carbon planning, low-carbon design, low-carbon construction, low-carbon operation and low-carbon recycling. In addition, three common elements among various definitions of low-carbon building can be summarized as follows: reducing CO₂ emission and improving energy efficiency, using low-carbon materials and techniques and renewable energy, from a whole life cycle perspective (Sartori and Hestnes, 2007; Williams, 2010, Cao and Liu, 2010; Li and Ou, 2010; Jiang and Li, 2010; Zhang and Zhang, 2010, Landage, 2013). The British scholar Phil Jones (2009) reiterated that the establishment of low-carbon buildings should base on the reduction of energy demand of building products and making full use of renewable, reusable energy. Comparing with conventional building, low-carbon building would bring more social, economical and environmental implications.

However, the current situation of low-carbon buildings is quite pessimistic. Among the existing buildings in China, very few of them can be regarded as true low-carbon buildings (Liu et al., 2011). As a result, researchers have made some contributions towards researching the influential factors of the development of low-carbon buildings from different aspects. Osmani and O'Reilly (2009) studied the drivers and barriers to develop zero-carbon dwellings in the UK from a house builder's perspective. Factors of legislation, finance and technology were elaborated in their paper. Davies and Osmani (2011) investigated the challenges and incentives of refurbishing the low carbon housing in the UK on the architect's perspective. Zuo et al. (2012) concluded the critical success factors of achieving carbon neutral buildings in the commercial building sector in Australia from the point of the stakeholders. Critical factors mentioned were mainly assorted into market, technology and policies (government support, regulation, exemplar projects) and so on. Baek and Park (2012) illustrated the barriers of energy renovation in Korea. Apart from the public cognition elements of public recognition and life pattern, investment costs, long payback period and premium were also noted. Moreover, the policies in the paper contained certification system, regulations and government support such as incentives. Domestic scholars also analyzed the reasons why China's urban low-carbon buildings develop slowly (Xu, 2012) and the barriers to construct low-carbon buildings. From their researches, it can be summarized that they commonly focused on construction cost, policy contents and public cognition that is divided into knowledge, awareness and lifestyle (Jiang and Li, 2010, Cao and Liu, 2010, Liu and Guo, 2012). Jiang and Li still toke the corporate innovation into consideration. After a large scale cross-country survey in Singapore and Hong Kong, Chan et al. (2009) highlighted the major obstacles that obstruct developing green buildings on the perceptions of the building designer. Similar construct of high upfront cost, fiscal incentives and awareness are demonstrated. Jiang and Tovey (2009) uncovered the barriers to achieve low carbon sustainability in the commercial buildings in Beijing and Shanghai, China. They devoted efforts on regulatory standards, monitoring system, awareness, etc. More specifically, in Zhang and Wang's research (2013) on barriers of China's building energy efficiency, legal barriers were further grouped into legal framework, specific contents, standard system and corresponding regulations. When it comes to the enforcement of laws and regulations, government obligation, supervision system and monitoring mechanism were involved. Moreover, market barriers covered evaluation system, market transparency and market demand. The public knowledge, awareness and lifestyle were once presented as the social barrier. Considering low-carbon capability, Wang et al. (2016) obtained the priority of six planning technologies in constructing low-carbon neighborhood from the aspects of “carbon source control” and “carbon sinks expansion”.

Though there are some researches on the barriers or measures to the development of low-carbon buildings, until now urban low-carbon development in China is not optimistic, and these studies barely promote the groundbreaking low-carbon development in the urban building sector possibly because of the different perspectives and context. It implies that only find out the critical factors can urban low-carbon construction make a new breakthrough. Sensing this, this paper, with quantitative and qualitative methods, presented a comparatively comprehensive analysis of the potential factors that affect the development of urban low-carbon buildings in China from the stakeholders' perspectives. Then, the paper classified all potential factors into critical factors to recognize the real reasons for the slow low-carbon development and further indicated the priority of these critical factors which has been underpinned by few domestic researches. The findings and proposals would provide significant theoretical implications for the future successful and efficient development of low-carbon buildings in China's urban area.