Dominik Wiedenhofer

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Verified

Dominik verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD, MSc, BSc
• Senior Research Scientist and Lecturer at BOKU University

Material stocks in infrastructure, buildings and machinery shape current and future resource use and emissions. Analyses of specific countries and selected materials suggest that material stocks might saturate, which would be important for a more sustainable social metabolism. However, it is unclear to what extent the evidence holds for a wider ran...

Roads and rail-based mobility infrastructures are the basis for mobility services and underpin several Sustainable Development Goals, but also induce material use and greenhouse gas emissions. To date, no stock-flow consistent study has assessed globally accumulated stocks of mobility infrastructures, associated material flows and emissions, and th...

Achieving a good life for all within planetary boundaries is essential for sustainability. But analysing this goal is hindered by problems of definition, measurement, and the large number of potentially relevant factors. The indicator ‘years of good life’ (YoGL) is defined as the number of years a person can expect to live above absolute poverty, e...

Demand-side options are increasingly recognized for their potential to mitigate climate change while reducing reliance on novel carbon dioxide removal. However, systematic analyses of implemented demand-side mitigation policy mixes remain scarce, compromising assessment and exploration of effective and feasible demand-side policies. Here, we provid...

Sand is increasingly recognized as the physical foundation of our modern world. With a growing population and rapid urbanization, global demand for sand has surged. However, our understanding of how much sand we use, the applications it serves, where it originates, and how much is recovered at the end of its life cycle remains surprisingly limited....

Global inequalities in resource use leave billions of people below decent living standards (DLS). Achieving universal access to DLS is estimated to only moderately increase energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Implications for the necessary expansion of socioeconomic material stocks in buildings, infrastructure and machinery remain underexplore...

While global resource use and GHG emissions keep increasing, the circular economy (CE) has ascended to the forefront of global policy-, business- and research agendas. Through narrower, slower and more closed material cycles, the CE aims to avoid waste and reduce virgin raw material demand, thereby potentially also mitigating energy demand and GHG...

Buildings provide indispensable services for human well‐being, but their construction and use are responsible for a substantial fraction of societies’ resource requirements and greenhouse gas emissions. Mapping and quantifying the material stocks in buildings is a key research frontier in industrial ecology. Reliable and spatially highly resolved m...

Extracting raw materials and processing them into products used in industry constitute a substantial source of CO2 emissions, which are currently lacking process detail in many integrated assessment models (IAMs). To broaden the space of climate change mitigation options to include material-oriented strategies such as the circular-economy and mater...

Material stocks of infrastructure, buildings, and machinery are the biophysical basis of production and consumption. They are a crucial lever for resource efficiency and a sustainable circular economy. While material stock research has proliferated over the last years, most studies investigated specific materials or end‐uses, usually not embedded i...

The rollout of electric vehicles and photovoltaic panels is essential to mitigate climate change. However, they depend on technology‐critical elements (TCEs), which can be harmful to human health and whose use is rapidly expanding, while recycling is lacking. While mining has received substantial attention, in‐use dissipation in urban areas has so...

Developing transformative pathways for industry's compliance with international climate targets requires model-based insights into how supply- and demand-side measures affect industry, material cycles, global supply chains, socioeconomic activities, and service provisioning that support societal well-being. We review the recent literature modeling...

Material stocks in long-lived products require >50% of annual global resource extraction for their construction and maintenance, and lock in energy and other dissipative resource-use through their technical and geospatial characteristics. Robust data on material stocks are thus fundamental to informing sustainable resource-use strategies. Yet, quan...

Understanding the size and spatial distribution of material stocks is crucial for sustainable resource management and climate change mitigation. This study presents high-resolution maps of buildings and mobility infrastructure stocks for the United Kingdom (UK) and the Republic of Ireland (IRL) at 10 m, combining satellite-based Earth observations,...

This pre-print is now published here, with the final title: "Demand-side strategies key for mitigating material impacts of energy transitions" --> https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02016-z As societies abandon fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy, electric cars and other low-carbon technologies, environmental pressures shift from atmospheric...

Full text available at makovlabs.com As fossil fuels are phased out in favor of renewable energy, electric cars and other low-carbon technologies, the future clean energy system is likely to require less overall mining than the current fossil-fueled system. However, material extraction and waste flows, new infrastructure development, land-use chang...

The global assemblage of human-created buildings, infrastructure, machinery and other artifacts has been called the `technosphere', and plays a major role in the present-day dynamics of the Earth system. It enables the rapid extraction and processing of materials from other spheres, combusts fossil fuels causing climate change, and transports mater...

Superblocks are traffic-calmed neighborhoods that contribute to climate change mitigation and improve living and health conditions of inhabitants without requiring extensive reconstructions. This article investigates experiments with superblocks in Vienna (Austria) from initial discussion to the first experimental implementation. We use an integrat...

Spatial patterns of material stocks in buildings and infrastructures are crucial for understanding resource use, spatial planning and environmental management. So far, spatially explicit stock-driven approaches face substantial data limitations, requiring costly and time-intensive efforts to map stocks at urban micro-scales. Herein, we developed a...

Extracting and processing raw materials into products in industry is a substantial source of CO2 emissions, which currently lacks process detail in many integrated assessment models (IAMs). To broaden the space of climate change mitigation options and to include circular economy and material efficiency measures in IAM scenario analysis, we develope...

Urban activities currently consume 75% of global final energy demand, which is expected to increase given absolute and relative population growth in cities. Assessments of both producer (upstream) and consumer (downstream) ecological and socioeconomic impacts of urban inter-industry exchanges are needed to reduce energy consumption and resource use...

Societal activities massively alter the global carbon (C) cycle, thereby driving global climate heating. Socioeconomic material stocks – e.g., in buildings and infrastructures – have been identified as a C pool that can potentially store increasing amounts of C, thereby keeping C away from the atmosphere. However, little is known about the size, co...

Societies’ use of material resources is increasingly recognized as a key factor behind sustainability problems. The mass of materials used per capita and year differs substantially between countries. However, a limited range of variables (mostly per‐capita gross domestic product [GDP]) were analyzed to explain this variation. Spatial patterns of ci...

The spatial arrangement of settlements constitutes a long-lasting legacy and shapes the prospects for transformations toward sustainability. Thus, understanding the drivers of changes in settlement patterns is essential. In this article, we present a spatially explicit, geostatistical analysis of settlement dynamics, and a qualitative investigation...

The authors are all devoted energy system and sustainability transformation scholars, who collaborate regularly and actively at global and local levels to advance the knowledge space of demand-side solutions and policies. They are members of a growing bottom-up initiative, the Energy Demand Changes Induced by Technological and Social Innovations (E...

Material stocks of infrastructure, buildings and machinery are the biophysical basis of production and consumption. They are a crucial lever for resource efficiency and a sustainable circular economy. While material stock research has proliferated over the last years, most studies investigated specific materials or end-uses, usually not embedded in...

Understanding global patterns of resource use is crucial for environmental sustainability. Because production and consumption are globally highly interconnected and unequally distributed, examinations of changes in cross-country differences in resource use can shed light on questions of development, equity, and responsibility for environmental pres...

Built structures increasingly dominate the Earth’s landscapes; their surging mass is currently overtaking global biomass. We here assess built structures in the conterminous US by quantifying the mass of 14 stock-building materials in eight building types and nine types of mobility infrastructures. Our high-resolution maps reveal that built structu...

Buildings are key in supporting human activities and well-being by providing shelter and other important services to their users. Buildings are, however, also responsible for major energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions during their life cycle. Improving the quality of services provided by buildings while reaching low energy demand (LED) lev...

The circular economy is a major topic in import-dependant nations like Japan, China or the European Union, where supply security, strengthening domestic value chains and greening economic growth are key concerns. In contrast, extractive economies, mostly in the Global South, provide resources to the world market and thus exhibit inherently linear r...

Understanding the drivers of household footprints is crucial for measures accelerating emission reductions. Well-documented drivers are demand, energy efficiency and decarbonization of energy supply, while working time and mobility have received little attention. Herein, German household energy and emissions footprints for 2000–2019 are investigate...

Understanding the drivers of household greenhouse gas (GHG) footprints is crucial for designing measures accelerating emission reductions. Well-documented drivers are demand, energy efficiency and decarbonization of energy supply, while mobility and esp. working time have received less attention. Herein, the drivers of German household energy and G...

Zusammenfassung Die Einleitung gibt zuerst das Verständnis der zentralen Begriffe wieder (klimafreundliches Leben, Strukturen sowie Gestalten von Strukturen). Diese fungieren als Vermittler zwischen verschiedenen Milieus, Diskursen, Werthaltungen und Disziplinen. Weiters gibt die Einleitung einen Überblick über die Rolle unterschiedlicher gesellsch...

Zusammenfassung Im Kapitel 8 wird das Thema Sorgearbeit und die für ein klimafreundliches Leben notwendigen Strukturen vorgestellt. Versorgung und Fürsorge der eigenen Person, von Haushalt, Familie und Gesellschaft sind unverzichtbare, (über-)lebensnotwendige, aber oft unsichtbare Tätigkeiten. Die Relevanz dieser unbezahlten Sorgearbeit für ein kli...

Zusammenfassung Koordinierende_r Leitautor_in Barbara Smetschka

Zusammenfassung Teil 2 gibt einen umfassenden Überblick über alle Lebensbereiche, indem die Klimaauswirkungen verschiedener Handlungsfelder analysiert werden. Kapitel 3 bietet einen Überblick über diese Handlungsfelder und ihre Verflechtungen. Untersucht werden die Klimawirkungen in den Bereichen Wohnen, Mobilität und Ernährung sowie für die Handlu...

Road infrastructure is an integral part of built environment stocks, as it delivers essential social and economic services. While previous work has assessed material stocks, flows, and embodied emissions, spatially refined mapping of materials accumulated in road infrastructure can highlight hitherto underappreciated synergies between improved spat...

Built structures, i.e. the patterns of settlements and transport infrastructures, are known to influence per-capita energy demand and CO2 emissions at the urban level. At the national level, the role of built structures is seldom considered due to poor data availability. Instead, other potential determinants of energy demand and CO2 emissions, prim...

Modeling pathways toward sustainable production and consumption requires improved spatio-temporal and material coverage of end-use product stocks. Momentarily, studies on inflow-driven, dynamic material flow analysis (dMFA) extrapolate scarce information on material end-use shares (i.e., ratios that split economy-wide material consumption to differ...

High-resolution maps of material stocks in buildings and infrastructures are of key importance for studies of societal resource use (social metabolism, circular economy, secondary resource potentials) as well as for transport studies and land system science. So far, such maps were only available for specific years but not in time series. Even for s...

Dynamic material flow analysis (dMFA) is widely used to model stock‐flow dynamics. To appropriately represent material lifetimes, recycling potentials, and service provision, dMFA requires data about the allocation of economy‐wide material consumption to different end‐use products or sectors, that is, the different product stocks, in which material...

Developing transformative pathways for industry’s compliance with international climate targets requires model-based insights on how supply- and demand-side measures affect industry, material cycles, global supply chains, socio-economic activities and service provisioning supporting societal wellbeing. Herein, we review the recent literature mode...

The current enthusiasm for the circular economy (CE) offers a unique opportunity to advance the impact of research on sustainability transitions. Diverse interpretations of CE by scholars, however, produce partly opposing assessments of its potential benefits, which can hinder progress. Here, we synthesize policy-relevant lessons and research direc...

Global societal material stock in buildings and infrastructure have accumulated rapidly within the last decades, along with population growth. Recently, an approach for nation‐wide mapping of material stock at 10 m spatial resolution, using freely available and globally consistent Earth Observation (EO) imagery, has been introduced as an alternativ...

Decarbonizing transport is crucial for achieving climate targets, which is challenging because mobility is growing rapidly. Personal mobility is a key societal service and basic need, but currently not available to everyone with sufficient quality and quantity. The basis for mobility and accessibility of desired destinations is infrastructure, but...

Tackling the unfolding multiple environmental crisis requires a fundamental transformation of the global socio-economic metabolism of materials and energy flows to become more circular, efficient, carbon-neutral and compatible with Planetary Boundaries. Material stocks in the built environment, e.g. infrastructures, buildings and machinery, form th...

In the second half of the twenty-first century, a strong growth of global human population and economic activity went along with a rapid accumulation of societal material stock. Societal material stock encompasses all long-lived materials contained in buildings, infrastructure and other durable goods. Material stocks are the basis for human-living...

The article investigates the roles of the European Recovery Program (ERP) and the Organization for European Economic CoOperation (OEEC) in pushing France towards a pathway of petroleum dependency. The study is based on the energy transition and the Deep Transition frameworks, notably the analysis of specific collective actors. The analysis elaborat...

International datasets on economy-wide material flows currently fail to comprehensively cover the quantitatively most important materials and countries, to provide centennial coverage and to differentiate between processing stages. These data gaps hamper research and policy on resource use. Herein, we present and document the data processing and co...

Global material stocks of infrastructure, buildings, machinery and consumer products are growing rapidly, driving emissions and other environmental impacts during materials extraction, processing, construction and waste. However, international data on economy-wide material flows (ew-MFA) currently is limited to national extraction, trade and consum...

Spatial patterns of settlements and transport infrastructures are known to influence per-capita energy use and CO2 emissions at the urban level1–4. At the national level, other potential determinants of energy use and CO2 emissions, primarily GDP, received much attention5–7, whereas the role of settlements and infrastructure patterns was disregarde...

Informed environmental-economic policy decisions require a solid understanding of the economy's biophysical basis. Global physical input-output tables (gPIOTs) collate a vast array of information on the world economy's physical structure and its interdependence with the environment, which can help to monitor progress toward a sustainable circular e...

Their geomorphological characteristics make island systems special focal points for sustainability challenges. The Circular Economy (CE) Action Plan of the European Union foresees tailored solution sets for Europe's outermost regions and islands to tackle region‐specific sustainability challenges. We address the question of how islands can achieve...

Electricity infrastructures are key for the provision of crucial energy services and economic prosperity. We investigate the current state and historical development of the global power sector from a “stock-flow-service nexus” (SFS-nexus) perspective. The SFS-nexus emphasizes the interrelations and dependencies between social metabolism (i.e. stock...

Physical components of societies like infrastructures need biophysical resources for their construction, maintenance and use. These components, analyzed as societies' material stocks, predefine energy and raw materials and provide societal services, necessary for their functioning and for social welfare. The nexus between stocks, the resource flows...

The current enthusiasm for circular economy (CE) offers a unique opportunity to advance the impact of research on sustainability transitions. Diverse interpretations of CE by scholars, however, produce partly opposing assessments of its potential benefits, which can hinder progress. Here, we synthesize policy-relevant lessons and research direction...

Global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced to five economic sectors: energy, industry, buildings, transport and AFOLU (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). In this topical review we synthesize the literature to explain recent trends in global and regional emissions in each of these sectors. To contextualise our review, we present estimate...

Globally, more than half of all extracted materials are used to build and maintain material stocks. The United States of America (USA) is one of the largest global consumers of these materials. To assess the role of stocks for long-term material use in an affluent industrialized economy, we present an analysis of material use and stock accumulation...

Energy, food, or mobility can be conceptualized as provisioning systems which are decisive to sustainability transformations in how they shape resource use and because of emissions resulting from them. To curb environmental pressures and improve societal well-being, fundamental changes to existing provisioning systems are necessary. In this article...

As current action remains insufficient to meet the goals of the Paris agreement let alone to stabilize the climate, there is increasing hope that solutions related to demand, services and social aspects of climate change mitigation can close the gap. However, given these topics are not investigated by a single epistemic community, the literature ba...

Sustainable resource use calls for substantial changes to existing infrastructures, which lock societies into current resource use patterns. Urban mobility is a case in point: existing material stocks of infrastructure and vehicles require large amounts of materials and energy for maintenance and operation in order to provide mobility services, the...

The dynamics of societal material stocks such as buildings and infrastructures and their spatial patterns drive surging resource use and emissions. Two main types of data are currently used to map stocks, night-time lights (NTL) from Earth-observing (EO) satellites and cadastral information. We present an alternative approach for broad-scale materi...

Article can be downloaded via share link at: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1bzdC3HVLKiByH Energy and materials support food production, maintain and expand material stocks (e.g. buildings and roads) and provide services. In this paper, an exergy-based approach is used to provide an integrated perspective on the evolution of societal resource fl...

Societies use material and energy resources to build up, maintain and utilize long-lasting structures such as buildings, infrastructures or machinery, i.e. entertain a 'social metabolism'. Nexus approaches provide useful heuristics for interdisciplinary analyses of (un)sustainable society-nature interactions, for example by highlighting relations b...

Is reducing paid working time (WT) a potential win-win climate change mitigation strategy, which may simultaneously serve environmental sustainability and human well-being? While some researchers and commentators frequently refer to such ‘double-dividends’, most climate and environmental discussions ignore this topic. The societal relevance of paid...