Researchers warn that booming urban growth and dependence on carbon-heavy materials like steel and cement could push construction’s emissions beyond safe climate limits unless a global shift to low-carbon building practices begins now.
Study: Carbon footprint of the construction sector is projected to double by 2050 globally. Image Credit: Naiyana Somchitkaeo/Shutterstock.com
A paper recently published in Communications Earth and Environment has warned that the carbon footprint of the global construction sector is expected to double by 2050, potentially exceeding international carbon budgets and hindering efforts to meet the climate targets set by the Paris Agreement.
The Growing Carbon Footprint of Construction
The global population grows by about 80 million people annually and is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Most of this expansion will occur in cities, intensifying demand for housing and infrastructure. Simultaneously, global climate commitments like the Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit temperature rise to below 2 °C and ideally 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, require rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
This situation is a major challenge as the built environment’s construction heavily depends on highly carbon-intensive materials like steel, cement, and clinker, making the construction sector one of the hardest to decarbonize. It drives extensive resource use, including the extraction of 40 Gt of sand and gravel and over 20 % of global freshwater consumption each year, further creating environmental pressures.
To meet the Paris Agreement’s targets, balancing the urgent need for infrastructure to support population growth with the critical need to align construction’s carbon costs with climate goals is essential. Thus, determining when, whether, and how much the carbon footprint of global construction will surpass the carbon budget under current patterns of population and development remains a pressing global challenge.
Quantifying the Scale of Construction’s Emissions Problem
In this work, the researchers quantified the carbon cost of global built-environment construction in the last three decades and projected the future cost up to 2050, mapping the historical and future trajectories of built-environment construction’s carbon cost. The aim of the study was to offer insights into the debate about the feasibility of meeting the rising housing and infrastructure demand while adhering to the Paris Agreement climate goals.
The team first quantified the global construction industry’s carbon footprints using dynamically evolving trends and granular product-level information for the last three decades (1995–2022). Global multi-region input-output analysis, supported by EXIOBASE economic accounts, was used to calculate the carbon footprints. This approach is commonly used for footprint accounting in the literature and can obtain the entire supply chain footprints linked with a region or industry.
Rather than simply warning of risk, the researchers sought to establish when and to what extent the global construction industry’s carbon emissions could exceed the Paris Agreement’s carbon budgets. They quantified the magnitude of embodied carbon footprints in the construction sector, analyzed historical trends, identified contributions from supply chains, and developed future projections based on historical and socio-economic variables. These results were then compared with annual and cumulative carbon budget pathways for 1.5 °C and 2 °C targets.
Using input-output analysis, the researchers quantified embodied carbon footprints and traced contributions across supply chains. Subsequently, they modeled future projections for regional and global construction using several econometric approaches, including time-series forecasting, fixed-effect regression, panel ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, and simple linear extrapolation. The regression outcomes were described in the study as consistent and robust across models.
The team modeled per-annum carbon budget trajectories for meeting the 1.5 °C and 2 °C Paris goals using an exponential decay function and compared these trajectories with the remaining carbon budget (RCB) across multiple probability levels (83 %, 67 %, 50 %, 33 %, and 17 %). They then calculated total construction-related carbon footprints as the sum of direct and indirect emissions, with direct emissions arising from on-site activities and indirect emissions covering the entire upstream supply chain of materials and services.
Indirect emissions were estimated using the carbon footprint intensity of each input. Data from 1995–2022 in the global EXIOBASE input-output tables were used, covering 163 industries and 49 regions, representing 44 major economies and 5 “Rest of World” regions to capture over 100 million interlinked supply chains.
Emissions Surge Threatens Paris Agreement Carbon Budgets
The study showed that the global construction carbon footprint had doubled over the past three decades and is projected to more than double again by 2050. In 2022, over half of the industry’s emissions came from bricks, cementitious materials, and metals, while smaller shares were linked to glass, chemicals, plastics, and on-site activities. The construction sector accounted for one-third of global carbon dioxide emissions, rising from roughly 20 % in 1995.
Projections indicated that under a business-as-usual scenario, the construction carbon footprint would exceed the annual carbon budgets for the 1.5 °C and 2 °C climate goals within the next two decades, using up all remaining 1.5 °C carbon budgets by mid-century if current trends persist. Additionally, the study revealed a regional shift, with emissions stabilizing in developed economies but rising sharply in developing regions reliant on carbon-intensive materials.
A Global Material Revolution is Urgently Needed
In conclusion, the study findings emphasized reducing the construction sector’s environmental impact through sustainable, climate-resilient cities, which requires a global “material revolution,” shifting from carbon-intensive materials like steel and cement to low-carbon, circular, and bio-based alternatives.
Additionally, high-income regions must lead through innovation and regulation while supporting developing regions to mitigate the sector’s projected exhaustion of the 1.5 °C carbon budget by around 2050.
Journal Reference
Li, C., Pradhan, P., Chen, G., Kropp, J. P., & Schellnhuber, H. J. (2025). Carbon footprint of the construction sector is projected to double by 2050 globally. Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1), 1-11. DOI:10.1038/s43247-025-02840-x, https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02840-x
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