Intelligent Technologies and Market Mechanisms for Building Carbon Assessment and Reduction

Dear Colleagues,

The buildings and construction sector remains a major driver of global energy use and carbon emissions, making accurate carbon assessment and effective reduction strategies essential to sustainable development. This Special Issue focuses on integrated approaches to measuring, modeling, managing, and reducing both operational and embodied carbon across building design, construction, operation, retrofitting, and end-of-life stages. It invites contributions on advanced building energy modeling, data assimilation, BIM- and AI-enabled carbon assessment, LLM-driven carbon emission management for modular integrated construction (MiC), low-carbon retrofit decision support, carbon credits and emissions trading, blockchain-enhanced market participation, and green project planning and scheduling. It also welcomes studies on the climate-change economics of decarbonization pathways and building-related carbon credit mechanisms. Its purpose is to connect engineering, digital, economic, and policy perspectives to support evidence-based decision-making in the built environment. The issue contributes to sustainability by improving how carbon is defined, quantified, monitored, and reduced, while also strengthening transparency, efficiency, and implementation pathways. Existing literature often addresses retrofit modeling, digital construction, and carbon-market governance separately; this Special Issue usefully supplements that literature by bringing these strands together and promoting interdisciplinary, practice-oriented solutions for low-carbon and climate-resilient development.

https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/about

Dr. Jianfu Shen
Dr. Yue Teng
Dr. Yaning Zhang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.