The building sector plays a pivotal role in global climate mitigation and the pursuit of carbon neutrality goals. However, many existing assessments of long-term low-carbon transitions in the building sector rely on analytical frameworks that separate building energy use and carbon emissions from vintage-tracked building stock turnover. This disconnect limits the development of coherent and effective long-term decarbonization strategies for the sector.
To address this gap, Siqi Chen and Fei Guo at Shandong University developed the MESSAGEix-China-Building-R31 model, an integrated provincial-level modeling framework for China's building sector. Their article was published in Energy and Climate Management on June 26, 2026. The model is designed to capture the coupled evolution of building stock, energy demand, material demand, and carbon emissions, and to support the exploration of low-carbon transition pathways across 31 Chinese provincial-level regions from 2025 to 2100.
As the authors write in the paper, "Reliably identifying low-carbon transition pathways in the building sector requires a systematic analytical framework that captures the coupled dynamics of building stock evolution, operational energy use, material demand, and carbon emissions." To meet this need, the MESSAGEix-China-Building-R31 model could represent newly constructed, renovated, and demolished buildings within a dynamic vintage-tracking framework, and explicitly links these processes to end-use energy demand, material flows, and carbon emissions. The model consists of five interlinked core modules. The building stock turnover module represents new construction, retrofits, and demolitions, and uses a discrete-choice approach to characterize energy-efficiency investment decisions for both new and existing buildings. The energy demand module projects operational energy consumption across six end uses: space heating, space cooling, hot water, cooking, plug-in appliances, and lighting. The material demand module estimates the consumption of ten major building materials driven by stock evolution. The carbon accounting module quantifies emissions from building operations, material production, and material transportation. The low-carbon transition module is used to identify long-term decarbonization pathways for the building sector.
To assess the reliability of the model, the authors conducted calibration, validation, and sensitivity analyses. For building stock dynamics, regional Weibull lifetime distributions were fitted using population census data from 2000, 2010, and 2020. The simulated building survival ratios showed strong agreement with census observations. For operational energy consumption, simulated urban residential energy intensities across six end-use categories were compared with survey data from Tsinghua University Building Energy Research Center (THUBERC), and the relative deviation for all six end-use categories remained within ±5%. Moreover, the gaps between modeled energy intensities and those surveyed by THUBERC for rural residential and commercial buildings are approximately 2%. The study also compared modeled provincial residential energy consumption shares with provincial energy balance statistics., and the results showed strong consistency in spatial distribution. In addition, sensitivity analysis under the SSP2 pathway shows that the model is relatively sensitive to assumptions related to floor-space demand and building lifetime. Adopting SSP3-level per capita floor-space assumptions increases 2025-2060 cumulative carbon emissions by 6.9%, while shortening the maximum building lifetime from 70 years to 50 years increases cumulative emissions by 6.5%. These results are consistent with the structure of the modeling framework, which links building stock evolution to energy consumption, material demand, and carbon emissions through the "stock–energy–material–carbon" chain.
A key strength of the MESSAGEix-China-Building-R31 model lies in its highly granular vintage-tracking representation of building stock dynamics. By combining calibrated Weibull distributions of building lifetime with a mandatory demolition threshold, the model robustly represents new construction, renovation, and demolition processes across both urban and rural areas in China. In addition, it incorporates regional heterogeneity across multiple dimensions, including climatic conditions, levels of socioeconomic development, building envelope energy performance, energy technology mix, and supply structures. This enables the model to reflect pronounced spatial disparities within China's building sector, making it a reliable tool for multi-scenario and cross-regional analysis. Beyond supporting the design of differentiated provincial mitigation strategies, the framework also provides a methodological reference for other emerging economies seeking to align building stock expansion with low-carbon transition pathways.
This work was supported by the Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation under Grant No. ZR2025MS1121.
DOI Link:
https://doi.org/10.26599/ECM.2026.9400037
