Аңдатпа
Buildings and construction account for roughly one-third of global final energy use, and in Kazakhstan, a coal-based power system, a Soviet-era housing stock and rapid urban growth make the construction sector a decisive arena for affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, and climate action. This study examines how the expansion of the construction industry interacts with energy efficiency and carbon emissions in Kazakhstan, and whether energy intensity transmits the sector's footprint to environmental outcomes. The study employs annual secondary time-series data for 2006–2025 compiled from the World Bank World Development Indicators, the Asian Development Bank Key Indicators and the Bureau of National Statistics of Kazakhstan, covering CO2 emissions per capita, energy intensity, construction value added as a share of GDP, GDP per capita and renewable energy consumption, analyzed with unit-root and structural-break tests, ARDL bounds cointegration, error-correction, Johansen, Granger causality, VAR impulse responses and variance decomposition, mediation analysis, Durbin–Wu–Hausman and two-stage least squares diagnostics and six robustness checks. The results show that the energy-intensity equation is cointegrated (bounds F = 5.26; error-correction coefficient −0.956, p < 0.001), that a 1% rise in GDP per capita lowers energy intensity by 0.99% in the long run, that a 1% rise in renewable consumption cuts energy intensity by 0.38% in the short run, and that a 1% rise in energy intensity raises CO2 per capita by 0.66% in the short run and 0.45–0.69% in level estimates, while construction expansion raises CO2 per capita by 0.36% in total, of which 0.20 passes through energy intensity. The findings suggest that the construction sector's environmental footprint in Kazakhstan operates mainly through the energy-intensity channel, that growth and renewable deployment have delivered efficiency gains, and that no long-run equilibrium yet anchors emissions to efficiency, so decarbonization of the built environment remains incomplete.