• Energy Research

Abstract Building sector is a significant contributor to the global warming and thus the control of carbon emissions from buildings has received unprecedented attention. While China is pioneering in including building sector in its Emission Trading System (ETS) pilots, there is few practical trading. This study investigates the reasons of lack trading via exploring a building owner's optimal strategy that is based on a multi-objective optimization model to achieve required carbon emissions reduction with minimal incremental costs. The investigated emissions reduction strategies include adopting low-carbon technologies, purchasing emission permits from ETS market, and non-compliance. A typical four-star hotel in Shenzhen, China is selected as an empirical case to validate the proposed model. The result shows that non-compliance is the preferable strategy by the owners, and there is no permits trading from the carbon market. Key influencing factors that affect the owners’ strategic choice are further investigated with various scenarios and it is found that the probability of government environmental inspection, the penalty for non-compliance, and an owner's reputation loss will to a large extent change an owner's strategy. These findings provide a quantitative rationale for policymakers to reformulate existing initiatives and mechanisms to invigorate the ETS market in the building sector.

This paper presents the findings of an expert working group of researchers from East Asian countries. The group was tasked with developing a theoretically sound and practically implementable methodology for assessing the sustainability of biomass utilisation in East Asian countries based on the needs and potential of biomass resources in this region. Building on six years of research conducted between 2007 and 2013, the working group formulated a set of main and secondary indicators for biomass utilisation under three pillars of sustainability. For the environmental pillar, the main indicator was life cycle greenhouse gas emissions and secondary indicators were water consumption and soil quality. For the economic pillar, the main indicator was total value added and secondary indicators were net profit, productivity, and net energy balance. For the social pillar, the main indicators were employment generation and access to modern energy, and the secondary indicator was the human development index. The application of the working group methodology and indicators in sustainability assessments of biomass utilisation will enable decision makers in East Asian countries to compare the sustainability of biomass utilisation options and to make decisions on whether or not to launch or sustain biomass utilisation initiatives.

Abstract We use a time series approach to investigate the determinants of import natural gas prices in China with the aim to understand the impact of its natural gas market reform and liberalisation. We pay special attention to the impacts on import liquefied natural gas (LNG) and pipeline gas prices. The liberalisation of the domestic natural gas market and the reformation of pricing mechanisms in the country have caused systemic structural changes. Our results provide clear evidence of a slow but steady departure from oil indexation, in which China’s import gas prices are increasingly affected by market fundamentals such as economic growth, climate factors, policies and other market factors. The empirical results provide supporting evidence to further market reform in China. Moreover, we can generalise the present study to the development of East Asian natural gas price benchmarks. It is important for China and the East Asian region to develop their own natural gas price benchmarks that better reflect regional market fundamentals.

While many studies have examined the supply of green residential buildings (GRBs), few have focused on the demand and living experience of them. This paper explores the antecedents of existing residents’ repurchase intention and the effect of their residential satisfaction through a questionnaire survey in Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city, China. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the role of proposed determinants. Multi-group analysis tested the moderating role of residential satisfaction. Results show that residents’ satisfaction with respect to their homes in GRBs was heterogeneous with dissatisfied residents account for 55%. Residents’ knowledge about GRBs, their environmental attitudes and perceived usefulness of GRB were key determinants of repurchase intentions but trust in relevant institutions was not. Residential satisfaction played a moderating role in predicting repurchase intentions. This study enlightens practitioners in both private and public sectors to improve occupancy experiences of existing residents and to understand the repurchase behaviors of existing customers, by bridging the gap between strong green design and construction and weak operation and maintenance of GRBs.

The mitigation of climate change is one of the most serious issues in global public governance. To address the climate crisis, Chinese government has proposed a clear target of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality. Regional efforts are expected to play a key role in delivering China’s pledge to peak CO(2) emissions before 2030. However, the emission reduction tournament would result in rapid increases in emission transfers among provinces in China. If the current trend of provincial economic development and associated emission transfer mode remains unchanged, we forecast that 24 progressive provinces in China would peak their CO(2) emissions before 2030, while 6 lagged provinces would peak later than 2030. However, if emission transfers were not existed, the nationwide carbon peaking time would be one year earlier and the corresponding carbon peaking level would be 13% lower. Furthermore, compared to the situation in 2012, the emission transfer mode in 2017 would lead to a higher carbon peaking level, indicating that the switch to the emission transfer mode from 2012 to 2017 had increased the difficulty of carbon peaking in China. We suggest that the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities should be applied when decomposing the national carbon peaking targets into provinces, and China must avoid a tournament among local governments on carbon peaking.

Abstract This paper examines the endogenous evolution of household consumption patterns and household carbon emissions (HCEs) by integrating the analysis methods of income distribution with climate change. Based on a large-scale household survey spanning from 2012 to 2016 in China, we estimated the direct and indirect HCEs, observed inverse U-shaped Carbon Kuznets Curves (CKC) and significant changes in HCEs over the period at the household level. Applying the Oaxaca-Blinder method, we decomposed factors causing the changes in HCEs and found that income and demographic effects contribute only 25.1% to the total increase of HCEs. The other 74.9% remain unexplained and we define them as the effect of intertemporal lifestyle changes. Further analysis from multiple perspectives illustrates that the lifestyles of households across various social strata are becoming increasingly higher carbon-intensive over time even though the income remains unchanged. The findings indicate that existing modeling and projections of carbon emissions based on income and household characteristics may underestimate the future emissions pressure from the household sector. Hence, we conclude that in order to reach more meaningful results, the increasing effect of lifestyles should be taken into account when conducting climate change studies and formulating climate policies.