Building stock archetype and modelling (BSAM) framework for coupled material-energy‑carbon assessment

The building sector accounts for approximately 37% of global energy- and process-related emissions, half of natural material consumption, and one-third of solid waste generation. In response, a wide range of sustainability strategies, including many rooted in the circular economy, have been proposed to mitigate these environmental burdens.

Understanding the effectiveness and priority of these strategies relies on simulation and assessment of building stock scenarios. Research into Building Stock Archetype and Modelling (BSAM) has expanded rapidly to meet this need.

As sustainability strategies typically generate interactive impacts across the material flow, energy consumption, and carbon emission dimensions, BSAM should capture the coupling nature for comprehensive sustainability assessments. Yet most existing BSAM studies focus on a single sustainable dimension and neglect the intrinsic material-energy‑carbon coupling, leading to a fragmented understanding of the benefit and cost of sustainability strategies.

This interdisciplinary review proposes a three-layer BSAM framework for both single and coupled environmental sustainability assessments. It categorises building stock-associated environmental impacts into five individual and four coupled groups, identifies building archetype classification criteria for each group, quantifies the quality-quantity trade-off of archetypes, and evaluates stock size estimation approaches from the perspectives of spatial scale, stock granularity, and source data availability.

This framework provides quantitative criteria for archetype development and comprehensive methodological guidance for building stock quantification, thereby underpinning coupled material-energy‑carbon sustainability assessment.

Click here to read the full paper by Liang Yuan, Brian Considine, André Cabrera Serrenho and Jonathan Cullen.

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