Green building emerged from the green movement around 1970s–1980s as a solution for meeting building demand while reducing the construction industry’s energy consumption and carbon emissions. Thus, promoting and accelerating the sustainable development of rural housing has strategic meaning for improving the living conditions of rural people, for reducing energy consumption, for improving environmental quality, and for promoting economic development. Even with fast urbanization, rural areas will still account for 38% of the total population in 2030 and 27% in 2050. Even if China can maintain a stable urbanization rate and eventually achieve a two-thirds urbanization ratio, there will still be more than 500 million people living in rural areas within the next two decades. Based on the latest projections of the World Bank, the total population of China will be approximately 1.5 billion in 2030. However, China still has more than 600 million people, occupying 24 billion square meters of building space, in vast rural areas. In China, much more attention has been paid to the GHG emissions from cities, owing to its accelerated urbanization. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asserts that the building sector contributed 40% to the total energy consumption and 25% to the global total CO 2 emissions. As the primary contributor of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the construction industry plays a significant role in global warming. It is widely known that greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide (CO 2), is blamed as the main cause of global warming. Global warming has been a severe environmental problem for human beings in recent decades. From the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to the Copenhagen Accord, and most recently, Conference of the Parties 21 (COP21) in Paris, many countries have been seeking measures to maintain both social and economic development and environmental improvement for sustainability.
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