China’s Building Energy Efficiency Targets: Challenges or Opportunities?

Climate change and global warming are important issues of our time, which have been dominating governments’ strategies, policies, building codes and standards and also research funding of university institutions all over the world. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Kyoto Protocol has established a basis of an agreement to cut CO2 emissions to alleviate the adverse effects of global warming [1]. China’s double digits economic growth for the past two decades had resulted in a rapid rise of CO2 emissions and other atmospheric pollution of urban cities. Although China’s CO2 emissions are still low on a per capita basis, China has already become the largest producer of CO2 emissions in the world. In 2007, China exceeded the carbon emissions of USA, with emissions of more than 6Gt [2]. In 2011, China became the largest contributor to the global increase of carbon emissions, rising by 0.72Gt, or 9.3%, primarily due to higher coal consumption [3]. In order to reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 28C, the Chinese government pledged a 40–45% reduction in national carbon intensity from 2005 levels by 2020 at the Copenhagen Summit which has formed part of the Copenhagen Accord, 2009 [4]. To realize the above goal, China’s 11th Five-Year Plan set a target to decrease the overall energy intensity of the economy (energy consumption per unit of GDP) by 20% [5]. The 12th Five-Year Plan adopted by the Chinese government in March 2011 pays considerable attention to energy and climate change and establishes a new set of targets for 2011-2015 [6], which include: