Resolving the Embodied Carbon of Germany's Residential Building Stock

An interactive atlas mapping the embodied global warming potential (GWP) of more than 15 million German homes — the first building-by-building baseline of the residential stock, resolved at four nested spatial scales from federal state down to the 1 km INSPIRE grid.

What is this?

This atlas accompanies a forthcoming working paper by Kaufmann & Zhu (TU Munich) that delivers the first building-by-building embodied-carbon baseline of Germany's residential building stock. Embodied GWP is calculated per the DIN EN 15978 framework 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 are drawn from the ETHOS.BUILDA dataset (Dabrock et al., 2024) and combined with assembly-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 for analysis at national, regional, and neighborhood resolution.

Key findings

• Median 6.80 kg CO₂e/m²a would exceed the 2045 new-build embodied-carbon target by a factor of 8.6 if applied to new construction.
• Per-capita embodied carbon varies 3.5-fold across dense urban centers and shrinking rural districts — with 40% attributable to floor area per resident and 60% to construction efficiency.
• Per-area and per-capita signatures capture distinct supply- and demand-side dimensions of the building stock; the two are not interchangeable.
• The atlas operationalises this baseline at multiple resolutions for comparison against forthcoming EPBD limit values and the German dynamic building-sector carbon budget.

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