Exploiting vacant urban residential buildings to promote carbon neutrality in China

Urban construction has been a major contributor to carbon emissions. As
China’s housing demands decelerates, addressing the vacancy of residential
buildings has become essential for revitalizing the real estate sector and promoting low-carbon and circular urban development. Here we show that China’s housing vacancy rate within the available residential building stock may
have exceeded 30% since 2021. We assess three strategies to transform
excessive vacancy into an opportunity for carbon neutrality: (i) demand-side
mitigation by housing vacancy rate reduction to slow down near-term carbon
emissions, (ii) supply-side mitigation through the renovation of old residential
buildings, and (iii) restricting demolition for sustained carbon reduction.
These three strategies collectively yield superimposed carbon mitigation
benefits: moderate implementation could reduce China’s urban residential
construction emissions by more than 43% over 2023–2060, meeting a 2°Ccompatiblecarbon budget under the Sustainability Shared Socioeconomic
Pathways and offering a transferable framework for low-carbon, resource efficient urban construction.