Embodied carbon of Germany's residential stock

A building-by-building embodied-carbon account of Germany's 19.4 million residential buildings, resolved at four nested spatial scales — from federal state down to the 1 km INSPIRE grid — and decomposed into its product-stage, replacement, and end-of-life modules.

What is this?

This atlas accompanies a work-in-progress paper by Kaufmann, Meier-Dotzler, Lang & Zhu (TU Munich) that provides the first embodied-carbon account of Germany's residential stock resolved to every individual building. Embodied GWP is computed per DIN EN 15978 and covers the product stage (modules A1–A3), component replacement (B4), and end-of-life processing (C3–C4), annualized over a 50-year reference study period.

Building geometries and attributes come from the ETHOS.BUILDA dataset (Dabrock et al., 2024, 2025) and are combined with construction-level GWP intensities from the Meier-Dotzler (2023) construction-component database, harmonized through the TABULA building typology. Results are reported per unit net floor area and aggregated to four spatial scales.

Key findings

• The floor-area-weighted stock aggregate is 6.3 kg CO₂e/m²a; the median building embodies 7.2, with the middle 80% between 4.7 and 9.3.
• Intensity falls monotonically with building size and rises with construction recency: terraced and single-family houses carry the highest medians (7.5 and 7.4), apartment buildings the lowest (4.4).
• Decomposed by life-cycle module, most of the stock's remaining embodied emissions sit in end-of-life (C3–C4), not in component replacement (B4), and end-of-life is incurred only when a building is demolished.

What the module decomposition implies

Resolving every building into product stage (A1–A3), replacement (B4) and end-of-life (C3–C4) separates carbon already spent from carbon still to come. For the standing stock the product stage is already behind us, replacement is small and recurring, and almost all of the remaining embodied carbon sits in the end-of-life stage.

• End-of-life is contingent, not inevitable. C3–C4 emissions are released only when a building is demolished. For a building kept in use, they are deferred for as long as it stands, and for an indefinite service life they can be deferred indefinitely.
• Retention is a climate measure. Because almost all of the stock's remaining embodied carbon hangs on the demolition decision, keeping buildings in use is the strongest embodied-carbon lever available for the standing stock. Climate policy today asks whether a building meets an efficiency standard, not whether it is kept — but on the embodied side, retention is where the leverage lies.

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