Attention and sentiment of Chinese public toward green buildings based on Sina Weibo

Abstract Energy conservation and consumption reduction in the field of construction are the keys to achieving the target global temperature growth of the Paris Agreement. However, the current promotion of green buildings is still stuck in the rut of government excessive intervention, market less participation. In order to explore the status of the Chinese public’s attention, changing trends, sentiment orientation, and focus toward green buildings, this paper collected and analyzed information of Weibo users and posts and comments of popular posts related to green buildings. We used the Sina Weibo platform with web crawler technology and a text mining method. The results showed that: the public’s attention toward green buildings has enhanced significantly with the change of government governance ideas, but still needs to be improved. Although vertical greening houses possess good heat preservation and thermal insulation, 46.32% of the Chinese public has negative sentiments toward vertical greening houses mainly due to worries about the increase in snakes, and mosquitoes and other insects caused by the increased vegetation cover. Price is not the main reason why the public has negative sentiments toward vertical greening houses.