Short-Lived Buildings in China: Impacts on Water, Energy, and Carbon Emissions

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• 作者：Wenjia Cai ; Liyang Wan ; Yongkai Jiang ; Can Wang ; Lishen Lin
• 刊名：Environmental Science & Technology
• 出版年：2015
• 出版时间：December 15, 2015
• 年：2015
• 卷：49
• 期：24
• 页码：13921-13928
• 全文大小：340K
• ISSN：1520-5851

文摘

This paper has changed the vague understanding that 鈥渢he short-lived buildings have huge environmental footprints (EF)鈥?into a concrete one. By estimating the annual floor space of buildings demolished and calibrating the average building lifetime in China, this paper compared the EF under various assumptive extended buildings鈥?lifetime scenarios based on time-series environmental-extended input-output model. Results show that if the average buildings鈥?lifetime in China can be extended from the current 23.2 years to their designed life expectancy, 50 years, in 2011, China can reduce 5.8 Gt of water withdrawal, 127.1 Mtce of energy consumption, and 426.0 Mt of carbon emissions, each of which is equivalent to the corresponding annual EF of Belgium, Mexico, and Italy. These findings will urge China to extend the lifetime of existing and new buildings, in order to reduce the EF from further urbanization. This paper also verifies that the lifetime of a product or the replacement rate of a sector is a very important factor that influences the cumulative EF. When making policies to reduce the EF, adjusting people鈥檚 behaviors to extend the lifetime of products or reduce the replacement rate of sectors may be a very simple and cost-effective option.