Increasing global population and rising levels of wealth are raising demands for services such as shelter and mobility, leading to greater resource use and environmental impacts. Circular strategies can reduce the resources required for these services. However, the potential of circular strategies to reduce material demand is rarely quantified. Here, we present a method to link service, product, and resource use with circular...

Building material stocks (MS) account for over half of global raw material demand, significantly contributing to carbon emissions and land-use change. Yet, most research on material use in built environments focuses on Global North, overlooking rapidly urbanizing Global South. In this study, we present first spatially resolved estimates of building MS for three distinct socio-economic contexts in Pakistan. We develop a bottom-...

Understanding the dynamics of building material stocks and flows, including the turnover processes of building stock, is important for promoting sustainable resource use in cities. This study provides high‐resolution, integrated mapping of building material stocks and flows across various cities and regions in Japan, offering a detailed view of the country's spatial material metabolism. This research combines bottom‐up estimat...

Buildings provide indispensable services for human well‐being, 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 worldwide are so far not available. Existing...

Management of building materials’ stocks and flows is a major opportunity for circularity and de‐carbonization. We examine the relationship between material consumption and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions under different scenarios in Israel, a developed country with an already high population density that expects tremendous growth in its housing stock by 2050. We created scenarios of varying housing unit sizes and ad...

Silicon carbide (SiC) is a niche nonmetallic material that is essential in many industrial processes. Here, we integrate material flow analysis and supply chain resilience analysis to understand global SiC stocks and flows and to assess its supply chain. We use industry interviews to fill data gaps and collect information on the SiC system to overcome data scarcity. We find that globally around 1000 kt of SiC is produced each...

Recent research suggests that over 75% of resources extracted globally now go toward creating, maintaining, or operating material stocks (MS) to provide societal services like housing, transport, education, and health. However, the integrity of current and future built environments, and the capacity of the system to continue providing services, are threatened by extreme events and sea‐level rise (SLR). This is especially signi...

Resource‐use patterns may entail systemic risks and cascade effects, which consequently inhibit the ability to deliver socioeconomic services. Identifying resource‐use patterns exhibiting systemic risks and reshaping their combinations is a potential lever in realizing the transition to a sustainable, resilient, and resource‐secure system. Using an island context to assess the quantity and composition of resource throughput en...