As reliance on fossil fuels decreases in the operational phase of buildings, upstream emissions from material production gain greater prominence. Given Norway’s renewable electricity grid and largely decarbonized heat supply, climate change mitigation efforts are increasingly directed toward embodied emissions from material use and upstream production processes. However, for Norway’s residential buildings, current material stocks, resource flows, and associated embodied carbon remain unclear, hindering a clear overview of mitigation potentials.
In this study, we mapped material use and associated embodied emissions in residential buildings by integrating spatiotemporal inventories of Norway’s residential buildings with material intensity data and life-cycle emission inventories for a set of residential building archetypes. We considered three different building types (single-family houses, multi-family houses, and apartment blocks) and eight different time cohorts.
We found that concrete (including surrogates) is the most dominant material nationwide (179.1 Mt), followed by wood and wood products (43.8 Mt), predominantly from single-family houses. The oldest cohorts (constructed before 1970) contain 28.1% of the material stock. Total embodied emissions in Norwegian residential buildings amounted to 48.8 Mt CO2 equivalents, with the highest concentrations in urban areas but a greater per-capita contribution in rural areas. For the newest cohort (2021-2024), we show that annual embodied emissions caused by new construction is of similar magnitude as Norwegian household heating-related emissions.
Our findings for Norway emphasize the need for demand-side solutions and material efficiency to mitigate upstream building sector climate impacts. Jointly addressing energy and material dimensions of the building sector is key to achieving net-zero emission futures.