Buildings play a key role in the transition to a low-carbon-energy system and in achieving Paris Agreement climate targets. Analyzing potential scenarios for building decarbonization in different socioeconomic contexts is a crucial step to develop national and transnational roadmaps to achieve global emission reduction targets. This study integrates building stock energy models for 32 countries across four continents to create carbon emission mitigation reference scenarios and decarbonization scenarios by 2050, covering 60% of today’s global building emissions. These decarbonization pathways are compared to those from global models. Results demonstrate that reference scenarios are in all countries insufficient to achieve substantial decarbonization and lead, in some regions, to significant increases, i.e., China and South America. Decarbonization scenarios lead to substantial carbon reductions within the range projected in the 2 °C scenario but are still insufficient to achieve the decarbonization goals under the 1.5 °C scenario.

The planning of heating and cooling supply and demand is key to reaching climate and sustainability targets. At the same time, data for planning are scarce for many places in Europe. In this study, we developed an open source dataset of gross floor area and energy demand for space heating and hot water in residential and tertiary buildings at the hectare level for EU28 + Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland. This methodology is based on a top-down approach, starting from a consistent dataset at the country level (NUTS 0), breaking this down to the NUTS 3 level and further to the hectare level by means of a series of regional indicators. We compare this dataset with data from other sources for 20 places in Europe. This process shows that the data for some places fit well, while for others, large differences up to 45% occur. The discussion of these results shows that the other data sources used for this comparison are also subject to considerable uncertainties. A comparison of the developed data with maps based on municipal building stock data for three cities shows that the developed dataset systematically overestimates the gross floor area and heat demand in low density areas and vice versa. We conclude that these data are useful for strategic purposes on aggregated level of larger regions and municipalities. It is especially valuable in locations where no detailed data is available. For detailed planning of heating and cooling infrastructure, local data should be used instead. We believe our work contributes towards a transparent, open source dataset for heating and cooling planning that can be regularly updated and is easily accessible and usable for further research and planning activities.