in Ecology

Building material stock drives embodied carbon emissions and risks future climate goals in China

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Abstract

Long-term effects of massive building material use in China, which experienced intense urbanization in the past two decades, remain insufficiently explored. Here, to fill these gaps, we developed a high-resolution time-series database of building material stocks from 2000 to 2019 and found that China held 15% of the global stock, which accounted for 19% of the country’s total carbon emissions. Although rapid urbanization generally increased per capita building material stock, the extent of this increase varied across cities and building types. We show that the growth rate has slowed since 2016; however, it remains challenging to simultaneously achieve both carbon-neutrality and urbanization goals. Future urbanization in China is projected to consume 12.5% of the nation’s total 1.5 °C carbon budget and 37.4% of its average annual budget allocation. Addressing these challenges requires targeted urban interventions, such as aligning low-carbon material production with projected regional demand and strategically planning materials recycling from future building demolitions.

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Fig. 1: Methodological process flow for establishing a high-resolution, long-term building material stock database for China.
Fig. 2: Spatiotemporal patterns of building material stock mapped at 30-m resolution.
Fig. 3: Spatiotemporal dynamics of per capita building material stock.
Fig. 4: Embodied carbon emissions from increased building material stock.

Data availability

All the data used in this study are publicly available. The building material stock database generated in this study is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17174497 (ref. 68). Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data are available at https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/datasets/. Building footprint data used in this study are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8174931 and at https://doi.org/10.11888/Geogra.tpdc.271702. The CNBH dataset is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7015081. EULUC-China data are available at https://data-starcloud.pcl.ac.cn/zh. GAIA data can be accessed at https://data-starcloud.pcl.ac.cn/zh. The Global Urban Entities dataset can be found at http://geodata.nnu.edu.cn/. WorldPop population data are available at https://www.worldpop.org/. Carbon budget data can be found at https://carbonbudgetcalculator.com/.

Code availability

The code used to generate figures of this study is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17174497 (ref. 68).

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Acknowledgements

Qiao Wang is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Major Program No. 42192580). Z.C. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 41901414) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant no. 2243200008).

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Chaoqun Zhang, Lin Yang.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Chaoqun Zhang, Ziyue Chen, Liqiang Zhang, Xing Yan, Jianqiang Hu, Yuheng Fu, Qiancheng Lv, Jing Yang, Qianqian Wang & Qiao Wang

  2. School of Geography and Ocean Science, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Lin Yang, Manchun Li & Yanzhao Wang

  3. BOKU University, Institute of Social Ecology, Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Vienna, Austria

    Dominik Wiedenhofer

  4. State Key Laboratory of Severe Weather Meteorological Science and Technology, Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jianping Guo

  5. School of Geographical Sciences, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China

    Shaoying Li

  6. School of Land Science and Technology, China University of Geosciences, Beijing, China

    Zhen Wang & Ying Liang

  7. Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Mei-po Kwan

  8. Department of Geography, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Yuyu Zhou

  9. Institute for Climate and Carbon Neutrality, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Yuyu Zhou

  10. School of Economics and Management, China University of Petroleum-Beijing, Beijing, China

    Lu Lin

  11. School of Geography and Information Engineering, China University of Geosciences, Hubei, China

    Qiqi Zhu

  12. School of Geographic Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Bailang Yu

  13. Future Urbanity and Sustainable Environment Lab, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Bin Chen

  14. Key Laboratory of Beijing on Regional Air Pollution Control, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China

    Xiaoqi Wang

  15. College of Land Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Bingbo Gao

Authors

  1. Chaoqun Zhang
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  2. Lin Yang
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  3. Dominik Wiedenhofer
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  4. Jianping Guo
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  5. Ziyue Chen
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Contributions

C.Z. and Z.C. conceived and designed the research; C.Z., S.L., Z.W., L.L., B.Y., X.W., B.G., Y.L., J.H., Y.F., Q.L., J.Y., Y.W. and Qianqian Wang performed data analysis; C.Z., L.Y., D.W. and Z.C. wrote the manuscript; and M.K., Y.Z., L.Z., M.L., Q.Z., B.C., J.G., X.Y. and Qiao Wang contributed ideas to interpretation of results and manuscript revisions.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to
Ziyue Chen.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Hadi Arbabi, Chao Ding and Lola Rousseau for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Methods 1–5, Figs. S1–S7, Tables S1–S8 and Discussions 1–3.

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Zhang, C., Yang, L., Wiedenhofer, D. et al. Building material stock drives embodied carbon emissions and risks future climate goals in China.
Nat. Clim. Chang. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-025-02527-3

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