Decarbonizing residential buildings in the developing world: Historical cases from China

China's large residential building stocks lead to the serious effect of operational carbon lock-in, which becomes a major challenge in hitting the carbon peak by 2030. This work is the first to develop the Generalized Divisia Index Method with a matrix of 8 × 14 to identify fourteen factors and analyze the provincial carbon change (especially the decarbonization progress) in residential building operations from 2000 to 2018. It shows that: (1) The operational carbon emissions released by residential buildings increased during 2000-2018, with an average rate of 4.53 % per yr in 30 samples. Behind this, the most positive contributor is residential floor areas, while the most negative contributor is the share of household consumption expenditure in the gross domestic product. (2) The annual decarbonization of most provinces in northern China peaked before 2008, accounting for 4.70 mega-tons of carbon dioxide (MtCO₂) per province per yr, and in central and eastern China mainly peaked in approximately 2014, accounting for 7.21 MtCO₂ per province per yr, and the annual decarbonization in southern China generally continued to grow. (3) High levels of decarbonization and decarbonization efficiency have been observed in northern and southwestern China, with 35.06 MtCO₂ per province of decarbonization and 7.05 % per province of efficiency in 2001-2018. Overall, this study improves the analytical method to assess the decarbonization of building operations, and it helps the governments investigate the building decarbonization potential to promote the schemes of carbon peak.