Global warming potential of China's manufacturing industry and its implication on construction

China has been the largest carbon dioxide emitters since 2008. The manufacturing industry accounts for 57.5% of the national total energy consumption in 2014, thus becoming the single largest contributor to global climate change in China. The past trend of carbon emissions is useful to understand the current situation and make future decisions on achieving carbon reduction targets. This paper therefore aims to investigate the global warming potential of China’s manufacturing industry based on a decomposition analysis. The results indicate that from 1994 to 2014, the global warming potential of China’s manufacturing industry has increased by 5.3 billion ton CO2e. The increase in production volume is the single biggest factor leading to the increase, with an estimated value of 11.8 billion ton CO2e. At the meantime, effective strategies to reduce the global warming potential of the industry include lower energy intensity, cleaner industry structure, cleaner fuel consumption structure and lower emission factors of fuel, with estimated reduction values of 4.6 billion ton, 1.1 billion ton, 0.7 billion ton and 31.3 million ton respectively. The results are useful for regulatory authorities to examine the effectiveness of the reduction strategies that have been taken in the past in China and will help enable informed decision making for establishing appropriate reduction target in the future.