City-level building operation and end-use carbon emissions dataset from China for 2015–2020

The building sector, which accounts for over 20% of China’s total energy-related carbon emissions, has great potential to reduce emissions and is critical to achieving China’s emissions peak and carbon neutrality targets. However, the lack of data on operational carbon emissions and end-use carbon emissions in the building sector at the city level has become a major barrier to the development of building energy conservation policies and carbon peaking action plans. This study uses a combination of “top-down” and “bottom-up” methods to account for the operational carbon emissions of buildings in 321 cities in China from 2015 to 2020. The energy consumption in buildings is further broken down into six end uses: central heating, distributed heating, cooking and water heating (C&W), lighting, cooling, appliances and others (A&O). The dataset can serve as a reference to support city-level policies on peak building emissions and is of great value for the improvement of the carbon emissions statistical accounting system.