Abstract: Increasing urbanisation and climate change are one of the greatest challenges in the 21st Century. Many regions already face different negative impacts on cities such as growing local pollution, solid and liquid waste, traffic congestion and noise. A growing consumption of fossil fuels in cities leads to increasing CO2-emissions accelerating climate change. All over the world and also in China, cities are trying to reduce their carbon footprint. In that context, the concept of so called “low carbon cities” is promoted. Currently, 79 cities in China are considering low carbon concepts. To build a low carbon city is not an easy task as there are various barriers to be removed, such as financial, traditional and institutional barriers. Buildings belong to the most traditional and slow-changing innovative areas in industry. Further solutions are different for hot and warm climates than for cold climates. Due to a very fragmented and divided structure in smaller enterprises and in different areas, a holistic approach is hardly to get. In order to detect and to investigate the CO2 saving potential in the different building types of China, the following steps of work had been done:
• Numeric simulation of the range of the energy demand from the selected building types
• Calculation of the energy saving-/ CO2 emissions saving potential of each building type
• Forecast of the CO2 emissions saving potential for a whole pilot-region
In scope of this investigation, the available values from measurements of buildings/building categories will be compared to numeric calculations of energy requirement.