No abstract

From 1995 to 2005, building energy use in China increased more rapidly than the world average. China has been adding 0.4 to 1.6 billion square meters of floor space annually 2 , making it the world's largest market for new construction. In fact, by 2020, China is expected to comprise half of all new construction. In response to this, China has begun to make important steps towards achieving building energy efficiency, including the implementation of building energy standards that requires new buildings to be up to 65% more efficient than buildings from the early 1980s. Making progress on reducing building energy use requires both a comprehensive code and a robust enforcement system. The latter-the enforcement system-is a particularly critical component for assuring that a building code has an effect. China has dramatically enhanced its enforcement system for building energy codes in the past two years, with more detailed requirements for ensuring enforcement and new penalties for non-compliance. We believe that the U.S. and other developed countries could benefit from learning about the multiple checks and the documentation required in China. Similarly, some of the more user-friendly enforcement approaches developed in the U.S. and elsewhere may be useful for China as it strives to improve enforcement in rural and smaller communities. In this article, we provide context to China's building codes enforcement system by comparing it to the U.S. Among some of the enforcement mechanisms we look at are testing and rating procedures, compliance software, and training and public information.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations worldwide pledged emissions reductions (Nationally Determined Contributions—NDCs) to avert the threat of climate change, and agreed to periodically review these pledges to strengthen their level of ambition. Previous studies have analyzed NDCs largely in terms of their implied contribution to limit global warming, their implications on the energy sector or on mitigation costs. Nevertheless, a gap in the literature exists regarding the understanding of implications of the NDCs on countries’ Energy-Water-Land nexus resource systems. The present paper explores this angle within the regional context of Latin America by employing the Global Change Assessment Model, a state-of-the-art integrated assessment model capable of representing key system-wide interactions among nexus sectors and mitigation policies. By focusing on Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia, we stress potential implications on national-level water demands depending on countries’ strategies to enforce energy-related emissions reductions and their interplays with the land sector. Despite the differential implications of the Paris pledges on each country, increased water demands for crop and biomass irrigation and for electricity generation stand out as potential trade-offs that may emerge under the NDC policy. Hence, this study underscores the need of considering a nexus resource planning framework (known as “Nexus Approach”) in the forthcoming NDCs updating cycles as a mean to contribute toward sustainable development.