1 Introduction
With the rapid economic development in recent years, China’s total carbon emissions have also jumped to the top of the world, increasing from 1.500 billion tons in 1980 to 11.470 billion tons in 2021, showing a large increase and high emissions [1-3]. At the 75th UNGA video conference in 2020, General Secretary Xi Jinping proposed that China had decided to strive to reach peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and to achieve the goal of carbon neutrality by 2060. This marks a gradual transition in China’s energy consumption structure from being dominated by traditional energy sources to a two-wheel drive and synergistic development of traditional and new energy sources [4, 5].
According to statistics, China’s total energy consumption in the construction industry in 2019 is 2.233 billion tons of standard coal, and the total carbon emissions in the construction process is 4.997 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about half of the total carbon emissions in the country [6]. On the other hand, rural residential buildings, as an important part of China’s building sector, account for about 25% of the total building energy consumption in the country; however, due to the low energy utilization rate, unreasonable structure and low consumption level of rural residential buildings, the energy consumption of rural residents has been increasing year by year [7, 8]. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the evaluation of low carbonization of rural residential buildings for rural revitalization and energy conservation [9].
Scholars at home and abroad have conducted research on how to achieve a low-carbon transition in rural residential buildings, with research focusing on both rural energy use and energy evaluation. Filippo Padovani et al [10] examined the technical characteristics of electrification for sustainable heating in remote rural areas in the Midwest of the United States, showing that if the goal of using all renewable energy is achieved, building carbon emissions will be reduced. Dominguez Cristina et al [11] analyzed the pathways to clean energy transition in rural Kenya and showed that women play a key role in the energy transition as decision makers, with female-headed households preferring to switch to cleaner fuels at an early stage. Zhang [12] studied how the development of clean heating in rural areas can be optimized, using TRNSYS software to simulate energy consumption in combination with a study of 500 typical farm households to simulate the current status of heating in farm houses in Shandong, the current status of maintenance structure, heating energy structure and other major influencing factors, and to design five clean heating options for economic and environmental benefit analysis in rural areas of Shandong. Yuan et al [13] carried out a questionnaire survey on the construction of farm houses for farmers in the rural areas of Chang’an District, Xi’an, and categorized and analyzed them from a low-carbon perspective. The survey results show that scholars at home and abroad are fully aware of the importance of low-carbon technologies in rural housing. It can be seen that scholars at home and abroad have fully affirmed the importance of low-carbon rural residential buildings, analyzed the problems of low-carbon development of rural residential buildings and proposed corresponding solutions. However, there is still a lack of research on the topic of low-carbon transformation of rural residential buildings, which does not match the scale of the total floor area of rural residential buildings in China. Moreover, the assessment of clean energy use in rural residential buildings rarely uses multiple indicators to measure the low-carbon nature of energy use, and the low-carbon evaluation of clean energy use in rural residential buildings is insufficient.
Based on the existing research results, this paper identifies the important factors affecting the low-carbon transition of rural residential buildings from the perspective of sustainable development of building low-carbonization, determines the low-carbon evaluation system of rural residential buildings by APH, and applies the system to a rural residential building low-carbon evaluation study, and then proposes targeted low-carbon strategies to provide a theoretical basis for the establishment of an effective rural residential building clean energy low-carbon evaluation system.