A golden age for the green building industry

At the 10th International Green Building and Building Energy Efficiency Conference and New Technologies and Products Expo, Qiu Baoxing, vice minister of Housing and Urban-Rural development, said that in recent years, China's green building has doubled every year, and 170 million square meters of new green buildings are expected to be added in 2014. The double growth of the green building industry and the huge market demand space currently exist, indicating that the golden age of the development of green building industrialization has arrived, and it also indicates that the "green gold" era of huge profits of green buildings has arrived!

"Since the Green Building Conference was first held in 2005, it has gone through ten years, achieving cross-country, cross-regional, multi-disciplinary and multi-field integration, and has developed into a grand event of the green building industry, and also revealed the grand blueprint of the green building industry in the next decade." Qiu Baoxing said to the China United Business Daily and other media in his speech.

At the first Green Building Conference, Qiu Baoxing, on behalf of the Chinese government, issued such a voice to the world: China will introduce a number of policies to encourage the continuous development of energy-saving buildings and green buildings. At the same conference, the Chinese government also issued the Beijing Declaration, indicating that China will commit to developing smart buildings and green buildings, and promote the construction industry to take the road of sustainable development.

In the following years, the relevant competent departments of the Chinese government successively issued policies and regulations on the development and promotion of green buildings, such as tax reduction and exemption, the establishment of discount loans, the issuance of financial subsidies, etc., and took mandatory restrictions on some buildings that did not meet the energy conservation standards, which further promoted the development of green buildings in China.

Ten years of searching forward, China's green building technology has improved as a whole, which is directly reflected in the number of green buildings. According to Li Congxiao, director of the Green Building Research Center of the China Society of Urban Sciences, by the end of 2013, a total of 1,446 green building evaluation and identification projects had been evaluated nationwide. More than 20 provinces and cities have officially issued green building action plans at the local level, 22 provinces and cities have formulated local green building evaluation standards, and green buildings in Qinghai, Hunan, Inner Mongolia, Henan, Yunnan and other places have achieved zero breakthrough. From the perspective of global development trend, green buildings have doubled in five years on average, while China has doubled every year, and the rapid development and growth is unstoppable.

Although China's green building has made great progress in recent years and has made certain achievements, there is still a gap compared with the international level of green building. At the same time, China's national conditions are particularly urgent for the call of green buildings. "China is the world's largest new construction last year, 2 billion square meters of new construction every year consumes 40% of the world's cement and steel. By 2015, 50 percent of new construction worldwide will come from China." Mahesh Ramanujam, chief operating officer of the U.S. Green Building Council and president of the Green Building Certification Council, predicted, "Not only that, but many Chinese are also moving from rural to urban areas, which makes improving employment and quality of life increasingly important." Green buildings can not only improve the quality of construction, but also meet the needs of China's economic development and make people's lives healthier."

"China is the most important construction market in the world, and the Chinese government has set some key targets in recent years, including a 16 percent reduction in energy intensity by 2015 and 30 percent of all commercial buildings being green by 2020, which means that China will have the most green buildings in the world by 2020. A huge market is emerging." Jerome Dai, president and CEO of United Technologies Building and Industrial Systems, said that the rise of green buildings has become a global trend and will play an important role in reducing global energy consumption.