IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-981-15-8892-1_114.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Quantifying the Carbon Footprint of Newly-Constructed Buildings by Using Life Cycle Assessment: A Case Study of Shenzhen City, China

In: Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Advancement of Construction Management and Real Estate

Author

Listed:
  • Jingjing Geng

    (Shenzhen University)

  • Huabo Duan

    (Shenzhen University)

  • Yuanyuan Huang

    (Shenzhen University)

  • Qian Liu

    (Shenzhen University)

Abstract

China’s building construction sector accounts for almost half of the world’s building construction by floor area. Associated with the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA, including 11 cities) driving forward, there will be over one trillion yuan to boost urban construction and development in the coming decade. However, the booming of the construction sector will inevitably consume a large number of resources and energy. How to build the GBA sustainably is full of challenges. Take Shenzhen city as an example, which plays a leading role in building GBA; this study is designed to quantify environmental impacts (measured by carbon footprint, CF, or CO2eq) of newly-constructed buildings in Shenzhen by using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method. The results show that CF has fallen sharply from a peak of 12 million tonnes (Mt) in 2003 to around 2.02 Mt in 2017 because of the fast decrease of buildings’ construction activities, which is associated with the decline of the number of the new permanent population. Residential building accounts for the largest share (50.4%) of the CF since it is still the main driver in Shenzhen city. The largest proportion of emissions comes from the embodied emissions of building materials, accounting for 87%. Meanwhile, this study took green buildings into considered and quantified the CF reduction from 2012 to 2017 to examine the development of green building practices in Shenzhen city. Although the reduction rate of the CF has risen continuously with the application of green buildings, the reduction in the rate of the CF was only 0.5% in 2017. The minimum requirements for green buildings in material saving and material resource utilization aspects should be further improved. Overall, these findings could provide not only technical, scientific evidence for policy-makers to promote the sustainable development of the building sector in Shenzhen and GBA, but also illustrate sustainable transition in other cities.

Suggested Citation

  • Jingjing Geng & Huabo Duan & Yuanyuan Huang & Qian Liu, 2021. "Quantifying the Carbon Footprint of Newly-Constructed Buildings by Using Life Cycle Assessment: A Case Study of Shenzhen City, China," Springer Books, in: Gui Ye & Hongping Yuan & Jian Zuo (ed.), Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Advancement of Construction Management and Real Estate, pages 1631-1646, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-15-8892-1_114
    DOI: 10.1007/978-981-15-8892-1_114
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-981-15-8892-1_114. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.