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.