Material production accounts for a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Resource-efficiency and circular-economy strategies, both industry and demand-focused, promise emission reductions through reducing material use, but detailed assessments of their GHG reduction potential are lacking. We present a global-scale analysis of material efficiency for passenger vehicles and residential buildings. We estimate future changes in material flows and energy use due to increased yields, light design, material substitution, extended service life, and increased service efficiency, reuse, and recycling. Together, these strategies can reduce cumulative global GHG emissions until 2050 by 20–52 Gt CO₂-eq (residential buildings) and 13–26 Gt CO₂e-eq (passenger vehicles), depending on policy assumptions. Next to energy efficiency and low-carbon energy supply, material efficiency is the third pillar of deep decarbonization for these sectors. For residential buildings, wood construction and reduced floorspace show the highest potential. For passenger vehicles, it is ride sharing and car sharing.

Summary: Construction material plays an increasingly important role in the environmental impacts of buildings. In order to investigate impacts of materials on a building level, we present a bottom‐up building stock model that uses three‐dimensional and geo‐referenced building data to determine volumetric information of material stocks in Swiss residential buildings. We used a probabilistic modeling approach to calculate future material flows for the individual buildings. We investigated six scenarios with different assumptions concerning per‐capita floor area, building stock turnover, and construction material. The Swiss building stock will undergo important structural changes by 2035. While this will lead to a reduced number in new constructions, material flows will increase. Total material inflow decreases by almost half while outflows double. In 2055, the total amount of material in‐ and outflows are almost equal, which represents an important opportunity to close construction material cycles. Total environmental impacts due to production and disposal of construction material remain relatively stable over time. The cumulated impact is slightly reduced for the wood‐based scenario. The scenario with more insulation material leads to slightly higher material‐related emissions. An increase in per‐capita floor area or material turnover will lead to a considerable increase in impacts. The new modeling approach overcomes the limitations of previous bottom‐up building models and allows for investigating building material flows and stocks in space and time. This supports the development of tailored strategies to reduce the material footprint and environmental impacts of buildings and settlements.

Building stock management is becoming a global societal and political issue, inter alia because of growing sustainability concerns. Comprehensive and openly accessible building stock data can enable impactful research exploring the most effective policy options. In Europe, efforts from citizen and governments generated numerous relevant datasets but these are fragmented and heterogeneous, thus hindering their usability. Here, we present eubucco v0.1, a database of individual building footprints for ~202 million buildings across the 27 European Union countries and Switzerland. Three main attributes – building height, construction year and type – are included for respectively 73%, 24% and 46% of the buildings. We identify, collect and harmonize 50 open government datasets and OpenStreetMap, and perform extensive validation analyses to assess the quality, consistency and completeness of the data in every country. eubucco v0.1 provides the basis for high-resolution urban sustainability studies across scales – continental, comparative or local studies – using a centralized source and is relevant for a variety of use cases, e.g., for energy system analysis or natural hazard risk assessments.