Construction enterprises are actively involved in engineering exploration, design, construction, and other activities that consume significant materials and resources. The development of a reliable method for measuring carbon emission efficiency (CEE) can help analyze their emission reduction potential, thus balancing economic growth with environmental sustainability. Along these lines, in this work, an enhanced three-stage data envelopment analysis slack-based measure model with undesirable outputs was employed to evaluate the CEEs of 55 publicly listed Chinese construction enterprises from 2017 to 2022. With the proposed methodology, various environmental influences are systematically eliminated through stochastic frontier analysis. Our analysis demonstrated substantial differences in CEEs between the first and third stages. Three environmental variables—economic development, total completed project value, and per capita output—were taken as determinants. After adjusting for these factors, the average CEE of construction enterprises over six years was found to be approximately 0.73, peaking in 2021, with significant room for improvement. According to the enterprise types, municipal installation enterprises exhibit the highest average efficiency (0.81), followed by decoration and renovation enterprises (0.78). Meanwhile, ecological landscaping enterprises show the greatest potential for emission reduction. China Communications Construction Co., Ltd., and China State Construction Engineering Corporation have maintained a leading position in CEEs in the industry for many years, while the CEEs of Shanghai Prosolar Resources Development Co., Ltd., Beijing New Space Technology Co., Ltd., and Shandong Meichen Science & Technology Co., Ltd., can only reach around 60%. Our work provides policymakers and industry leaders with empirical evidence for developing targeted decarbonization roadmaps in the construction sector, which is particularly valuable for emerging economies experiencing rapid urbanization.
Gao et al. (Fri,) studied this question.