Towards rural revitalization strategy for housing in gully regions of the loess plateau: Environmental considerations

Under the background of Chinese Rural Revitalization Strategy, how to improve rural regional environment and living quality is very important and urgent. At present, residential buildings in gully regions of the Loess Plateau have poor insulation and high-energy consumption. Thus, better ecological design can largely save energy and improve living comfort. The findings of this paper provide an insight into the ecological design potentials for reducing energy demand across rural regions in China. In this paper, we select three main types of residential buildings in gully regions and build energy demand models based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method. The results show that the energy demand in the building use stage is extremely high in all three typical buildings, which account for around 90% of the whole life cycle. The energy demand of the traditional adobe residential building is lower than the brick-concrete structure buildings. The LCA method used in this paper can quantify the energy demand in each stage of life cycle, which helps to put forward the corresponding ecological design strategy. The research results can be used as a reference in the future development of this region and other rural regions in China.