You Kairui, a postdoctoral researcher at the Beijing Laboratory of Carbon Neutrality System Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), and collaborators have recently introduced a demand-side strategy to decarbonize residential buildings throughout their lifecycle in China.

This provides a scientific basis for leveraging the demand-side advantages in the building industry chain to achieve cost savings, energy conservation and emission reduction goals. The related research findings, titled Mitigating emissions and costs through demand-side solutions in Chinese residential buildings, were published in the journal Nature Communications, a subsidiary of Nature.

The demand from the building sector for services and products from upstream supply sectors, such as material production, transportation, construction, and energy production, leads to significant carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for about 40 percent of global CO2 emissions. However, this demand is expected to continue growing in the future, especially in developing countries like China and India.

The building sector can achieve significant energy savings and carbon reduction by adjusting its demand for products and services from upstream supply sectors through three types of measures: "avoid," "shift," and "improve". There is an urgent need to establish demand-side solutions for the entire lifecycle of buildings.

To address the research problem, the BIT team used Chinese residential buildings as a case study to propose a demand-side solution framework for decarbonizing the entire building lifecycle. By integrating Life Cycle Assessment and Material Flow Analysis methods, they developed a dynamic system model that links the demand for products across multiple supply sectors. This model assessed the future emissions and cost inputs for 3^11 demand-side solution scenarios.

On this basis, considering the uncertainties in supply sector parameters, they evaluated the role of building sector demand-side solutions in mitigating uncertainties in achieving carbon neutrality goals.

The results showed that demand-side solutions in the building sector have significant carbon reduction potential, can achieve cost savings, and mitigate the uncertainties in reaching carbon neutrality targets. However, these solutions need to carefully balance the impacts across different lifecycle stages and coordinate with the decarbonization processes of supply sectors.

The framework for demand-side solutions targeting decarbonization across the entire lifecycle of residential buildings focuses on reducing carbon emissions at each stage of a building's life.

Cost-effectiveness of different demand-side solution scenarios

Paper details: You, K., Li, Y., Cai, W. …. Wei, YM., et al. Mitigating emissions and costs through demand-side solutions in Chinese residential buildings. Nat Commun 16, 7358 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62675-0