World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 3D - Material Stock - Global, 90m

Buildings provide indispensable services for human wellbeing, but their construction and use are responsible for a substantial fraction of societies’ resource requirements and greenhouse gas emissions. Mapping and quantifying the material stocks in buildings is a key research frontier in Industrial Ecology. Reliable and spatially highly resolved maps of material stocks in buildings world-wide are so far not available. Existing approaches based on nighttime light data allow large-scale coverage, but their spatial resolution is usually ~0.5-1 km. Other methods using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and cadaster data achieve higher resolution and accuracy, but do not allow wall-to-wall mapping of large regions. Based on high-resolution Earth Observation data combined with material intensity factors (kg per m3 of building volume), we here quantify and map material stocks in buildings at the unprecedented resolution of 90 m globally. We distinguish 18 types of materials in five types of buildings. We find that global material stocks in buildings amount to 547 (391-672) Gt, approximately half of total global societal material stocks. We find highly unequal distributions of material stocks in buildings per capita and per unit area of each country. Our results agree well with previous detailed estimates of material stocks in buildings in dedicated regions or individual cities. Improved and harmonized material intensity factors emerge as a key research area for improving the accuracy of material stock maps. Our results are available as data products with high spatial and thematic resolution to facilitate future studies; e.g., of secondary resource potentials.

Citation proposal
. World Settlement Footprint (WSF) 3D - Material Stock - Global, 90m. https://gdk.gdi-de.org/geonetwork/srv/api/records/14a0e9b4-08a7-4692-8d03-28d2a0617b29

INSPIRE
SDS

INSPIRE

Identification

File identifier: 14a0e9b4-08a7-4692-8d03-28d2a0617b29 XML

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Online resource

Protocol: WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

Protocol: WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

Protocol: WWW:LINK-1.0-http--link

Resource identifier

code: https://geoservice.dlr.de/catalogue/srv/metadata/14a0e9b4-08a7-4692-8d03-28d2a0617b29

Metadata language: English

Spatial representation type: Grid

Encoding

Format: GeoTIFF

Projection

Classification of data and services

Topic category

Structure

Classification of data and services

Coupled resource

Classification of data and services

Coupled resource

Keywords

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0 ( Theme )

Buildings

Other keywords

Keywords

opendata
DLR
EOC
WSF
3D
building material
building volume
material stock
Material Flow Analysis
Industrial Ecology
urbanization
global

Geographic coverage

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Date ( Creation ): 2024-10-25T00:00:00

Quality and validity

Lineage

The World Settlement Footprint 3D Material Stock is based on the The World Settlement Footprint 3D Volume,Height and Area Datasets in combination with the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) built-up surface grid residential/non-residential classification from the

World Settlement Footprint 3D - Building Stock: The World Settlement Footprint 3D V02 - Building Volume, Height and Area 90m datasets are combined with the GHS-BUILT-S_NRES_GLOBE_R2023A urban/non-urban classification and country region specific material intensity (MI) factors.