In response to escalating global environmental challenges, mitigating carbon emissions in the construction sector has emerged as a critical strategy for addressing climate change. As reported by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), the construction industry remains a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. This study investigates the influencing factors and optimization pathways for embodied carbon emissions during the materialization phase of prefabricated buildings. Through longitudinal field research at a large-scale precast component factory in western China, key carbon emission factors were identified using Min–Max normalization and Principal-Components Analysis (PCA). A cloud entropy–based evaluation model was further developed to quantify the emission weights of 32 factors. The results reveal the existence of ‘leveraging effects’ among emission factors, wherein certain low-weight factors exert disproportionate influence on systemic carbon reduction because of their cascading impacts on other variables. Prioritizing factors with greater leveraging potential is imperative for the formulation of effective emission reduction policies. This study leverages NK model simulations (10,000 iterations), to predict the reduction potential of each factor and identifies four indicators with the most significant leveraging effects. Strategic recommendations are proposed that emphasize a synergistic approach that integrates direct emission control and indirect cascading optimization. These findings provide actionable insights for achieving systemic carbon reduction in prefabricated building systems.
Wang et al. (Sat,) studied this question.