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Abstract

A better understanding of the material stock in the built environment is needed to reduce its climate and environmental impacts while also improving its circularity. We introduce a comprehensive, globally consistent method to estimate residential floor area and material stock at a fine-scale spatial resolution, using the latest publicly available datasets on key building parameters and material intensity. Applying our validation analysis for a selected number of countries and subnational regions, we found that our floor area estimations underestimated official statistics by 30–40 %. Comparing our material stocks estimations with various definitions of building typologies and results from other studies, we found some degree of variation. These results highlight the need for more strengthened and concerted efforts in filling data and research gaps in various world regions. Overall, the presented approach allows for more rapid and regionally specific assessments of the material stocks and related impacts to inform policy directions.