Carbon emissions from buildings based on a life cycle analysis:carbon reduction measures and effects of green building standards in China

Carbon emissions from buildings account for approximately half of China’s total social carbon emissions.Focusing only on the carbon emissions of building operation tends to neglect the carbon emissions of other related parts of the building sector,thus slowing down the progress of carbon peaking in the building sector.By applying life-cycle analysis to calculate carbon emissions throughout the building’s life cycle,the performance of carbon emissions at each stage of building materials,construction,operation and end-of-life demolition can be identified,so that carbon reduction strategies in building design can be selected..This paper constructed a method for calculating the carbon emissions of green buildings in whole-building life cycle,and conducted a summary analysis of the carbon emissions of 33 projects that were awarded green building certification.The study found that the Chinese Assessment Standard for Green Buildings has a significant effect on reducing the carbon emissions of buildings in whole-building life cycle.Compared with the current average operational carbon emissions of buildings in China,the carbon intensity of green public buildings is 41.43%lower under this standard and the carbon intensity of green residential buildings is 13.99%lower.A carbon correlation analysis of the provisions of the current Chinese Assessment Standard for Green Buildings was conducted,comparing the changes in the carbon intensity of buildings before and after the revision of the standards.The study concluded that the new version of the standards has a greater impact on public buildings than residential buildings,the requirement of carbon emission reduction in the production stage of building materials is strengthened in terms of carbon emission during the whole-building life cycle.This study addresses the current problem of unclear carbon emission reduction effect of green buildings.

EVALUATION OF BIM APPLICATION FOR WATER EFFICIENCY ASSESSMENT

Application of Building Information Modelling(BIM)in architecture,engineering,and construction industry is known for its productivity and efficiency.Green BIM is one of the recent applications that aids users in achieving sustainability and/or improved building performance objectives through design and analysis of digital semantic models.The focus is on the application of green BIM for water efficiency(WE)analysis in accordance with the Malaysian Green Building Index(GBI)as a sustainability assessment tool.Revit Green Project Template(RGPT)and Autodesk Green Building Studio(GBS)as two available BIM tools were selected to evaluate and compare the applicability of each method for GBI WE assessment.To resolve the limitations identified from each evaluated method,automated GBI assessment tool(AGBIA)was developed as an alternative.The AGBIA as a supporting tool was established with the use of Dynamo,a visual programming tool to compensate for the limitations faced in the investigated methods.The practicality of each method was explored using a hypothetical model in Revit to automate information correspondent to 10 water efficiency assessment points and generate reports and documents necessary for the GBI design stage certification.The final phase involves verification of results obtained from each method using the conventional GBI WE calculator.AGBIA is suitable for the green BIM users in Malaysia based on the flexibility and automation over defining and assigning green parameters that are in line with the local context,the direct link of green information to the model,as well as the detail of presented data.