Helmut Haberl

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna | boku · Institute of Social Ecology

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...

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...

In Österreich sind Ziele wie „die Zersiedlung zu reduzieren bzw. zu stoppen“ (BMK 2023, 147) und die „Unterbindung von Zersiedlung“ (ÖROK 2023, 23) seit Jahren verstärkt Inhalt politischer Ausverhandlungsprozesse. Aktuell ist der Beschluss einer rechtlich bindenden österreichischen Bodenstrategie, die im Entwurf vorliegt, gescheitert, weil keine Ei...

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...

Biomass is crucial for energy in rural households in low- and middle-income countries, yet its use has significant health and environmental impacts due to indoor combustion and extraction processes. Lack of comprehensive data hinders understanding of biomass flows from ecosystems to consumption, affecting analysis of its social and environmental ef...

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...

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...

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...

This dataset includes data on the embodied human appropriation of net primary production (eHANPP) associated with products derived from agriculture and forestry. The human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) is an indicator of changes in the yearly availability of biomass energy from photosynthesis that remains available in terrestrial...

Socio-metabolic regimes and their respective sustainability problems are characterized by their specific patterns of natural resource use. During socio-metabolic transitions, these patterns change fundamentally. For example, hunter-gatherers depend on extracting edible biomass from largely unaltered ‘natural’ ecosystems. In contrast, agrarian socie...

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...

Unlabelled: European farm households will face increasingly challenging conditions in the coming decades due to climate change, as the frequency and severity of extreme weather events rise. This study assesses the complex interrelations between external framework conditions such as climate change or adjustments in the agricultural price and subsid...

Aim Land use is the most pervasive driver of biodiversity loss. Predicting its impact on species richness (SR) is often based on indicators of habitat loss. However, the degradation of habitats, especially through land‐use intensification, also affects species. Here, we evaluate whether an integrative metric of land‐use intensity, the human appropr...

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...

More than three billion people depend on solid fuels for household energy, especially in rural areas of low and lower-middle income countries (LIC/LMIC). Rural households in LIC/LMIC use energy for a wide range of purposes, including food preparation, space and water heating, insect repulsion, illumination or the preparation of goods for sale. Howe...

Socio-metabolic research investigates societies’ extraction of raw materials and energy from the environment, their transformation into products, biophysical trade flows, the accumulation of societal material stocks (buildings, infrastructures, long-lived products), biophysical aspects of consumption, and releases of emissions and wastes to the env...

The notion of societal boundaries aims to enhance the debate on planetary boundaries. The focus is on capitalist societies as a heuristic for discussing the expansionary dynamics, power relations, and lock-ins of modern societies that impel highly unsustainable societal relations with nature. While formulating societal boundaries implies a controve...

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. The article starts by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of planetary boundaries from a social science perspective. It is argued that the growth imperative of capitalist economies, as well as other particular characterist...

Farmers in Europe act within guidelines set by agricultural programs, market demands and biophysical constraints. At the same time, they are social actors embedded in their respective family structures and individual lifestyles and preferences. We here present the socio-ecological land-use model SECLAND that provides an improved representation of t...

With ongoing global urbanization processes and consumption patterns increasingly recognized as key determinants of environmental change, a better understanding of the links between urban consumption and biodiversity loss is paramount. Here we quantify the global biodiversity footprint (BDF) of Vienna's (Austria) biomass consumption. We present a st...

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...

Human impacts on natural systems are often analysed using a statistical model based on the 50-year old IPAT concept, where impact (I) is a function of population (P), affluence (A), and technology (T). Varied results have accrued, but problems remain: ecological predictors are not part of the anthropocentric IPAT concept or statistical model; vastl...

It is important to look beyond the most obvious energy service households in low- and middle income countries derive from biomass: cooking. Our investigations in rural Ethiopia reveal a broad spectrum of energy services that biomass combustion offers. Energy research must make efforts to better understand these real-life energy service needs of hou...

The global livestock system puts increasing pressures on ecosystems. Studies analyzing the ecological impacts of livestock supply chains often explain this pressure by the increasing demand for animal products. Food regime theory proposes a more nuanced perspective: it explains livestock-related pressures on ecosystems by systemic changes along the...

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...

Transforming and expanding the electricity sector are key for climate change mitigation and alleviation of energy poverty. Future energy systems based on renewable energy sources may reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but could require more materials during construction. We assess this trade-off by quantifying the requirements of the main bulk m...

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...

Land use is central to addressing sustainability issues, including biodiversity conservation, climate change, food security, poverty alleviation, and sustainable energy. In this paper, we synthesize knowledge accumulated in land system science, the integrated study of terrestrial social-ecological systems, into 10 hard truths that have strong, gene...

Increasing evidence—synthesized in this paper—shows that economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss via greater resource consumption and higher emissions. Nonetheless, a review of international biodiversity and sustainability policies shows that the majority advocate economic growth. Since improvements in resource use efficiency have so far n...

Land-use has transformed ecosystems over three quarters of the terrestrial surface, with massive repercussions on biodiversity. Land-use intensity is known to contribute to the effects of land-use on biodiversity, but the magnitude of this contribution remains uncertain. Here, we use a modified countryside species-area model to compute a global acc...

Land-use has transformed ecosystems over three quarters of the terrestrial surface, with massive repercussions on biodiversity. Land-use intensity is known to contribute to the effects of land-use on biodiversity, but the magnitude of this contribution remains uncertain. Here, we use a modified countryside species-area model to compute a global acc...

Forest-based mitigation strategies will play a pivotal role for achieving the rapid and deep net-emission reductions required to prevent catastrophic climate change. However, large disagreement prevails on how to forge forest-based mitigation strategies, in particular in regions where forests are currently growing in area and carbon density. Two op...

The rapidly rising generation of municipal solid waste jeopardizes the environment and contributes to climate heating. Based on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, we here develop a global systematic approach for evaluating the potentials to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants from the implementation of circular municipal waste m...

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...

Close to 40% of Earth's land area is used for agriculture to provide humankind with plant- and animal-based food, fibers or bioenergy. Future trends in agricultural land use, livestock husbandry and associated environmental pressures are determined by developments in the food sector, agricultural productivity, technology, and many other influencing...

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...

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...

Land use has greatly transformed Earth’s surface. While spatial reconstructions of how the extent of land cover and land‐use types have changed during the last century are available, much less information exists about changes in land‐use intensity. In particular, global reconstructions that consistently cover land‐use intensity across land‐use type...

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...

Electricity infrastructures are crucial for economic prosperity and underpin fundamental energy services. This article provides global datasets on installed power plant capacities, transmission and distribution grid lengths as well as transformer capacities. A country-level dataset on installed electricity generation capacities during 1980 to 2017,...

The planetary boundaries concept has profoundly changed the vocabulary and representation of global environmental issues. We bring a critical social science perspective to this framework through the notion of societal boundaries and aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social nature of thresholds. We start by highlighting the strength...

Sustainable food systems face trade-offs between demands of low environmental pressures per unit area and requirements of increasing production. Organic farming has lower yields than conventional agriculture and requires the introduction of nitrogen (N) fixing legumes in crop rotations. Here we perform an integrated assessment of the feasibility of...

The dataset includes 90 global food system and land use scenarios developed with the model BioBaM-GHG 2.0. The scenarios have been developed for assessing the global potential of forest regeneration for climate mitigation to 2050 under various food system pathways, i.e. diets, crop yield developments, land requirements for energy crops, and two var...

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...

Background Land use is the major driver of the current biodiversity crisis. However, its impact is not yet adequately reflected in biodiversity scenarios. In particular, effects of land‐use intensity are often neglected although natural limits to land conversion will likely enforce further land‐use intensification in the future. Aims and innovatio...