Potential and roadmap of CO₂ emission reduction in urban buildings: Case study of Shenzhen

Buildings play an increasingly important role to determine the trend of CO₂ emissions in cities. Whether CO₂ emissions from buildings can be effectively mitigated has great significance for cities to achieve climate governance goals. The study takes Shenzhen, a China's megacity, as an example to examine how the penetration of newly emerging clean technologies and consumer-to-prosumer role transition of buildings will contribute to CO₂ emission reductions. Based on a Low Emissions Analysis Platform (LEAP) model, the major results indicate that CO₂ emissions of Shenzhen's building sector could be capped by 2022–2025 and substantially decreased by more than 60% by 2030. Accelerating energy efficiency retrofitting of existing buildings and enforcing stricter design standards on new buildings could largely reduce CO₂ emissions, but still unable to prevent them from growing. The intensification of building energy-saving management and promotion of distributed renewable energy use would bring additional potentials of emission reduction, enabling a peak-reaching and a rapid downward trend of building emissions. To achieve the potentials, close cooperation and synergic efforts between multiple stakeholders are advocated for establishing intelligent energy-saving management systems, decarbonizing urban power supply, and popularizing distributed rooftop photovoltaic power stations.