Global material use and environmental impact under future economic scenarios

REMASS researchers have mapped how the world’s appetite for materials could reshape the planet this century—and the results are stark. Fresh of the press in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the authors find that global “in-use” material stocks—everything from buildings and roads to vehicles and machinery—expand in every standard Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP) between 2020 and 2100, from a fivefold rise in a “middle-of-the-road” world to nearly ninefold in a high-growth, high-consumption trajectory (SSP5).

Only a specially constructed low material demand (LMD) pathway, pairing slower economic growth with strong decoupling between GDP and material stocks, limits growth to about +55%. Without deliberate materials-oriented mitigation measures, the environmental pressures linked to producing materials and manufacturing material product stocks —energy use, CO2 emissions, land appropriation, and waste—rise substantially in almost all futures. Production of major materials such as steel and concrete grows in every scenario except LMD, and waste continues to swell for decades because infrastructure and products retire on long time lags.

For this research, the team developed a new, physically consistent module for the SuCCESs integrated assessment model that translates economy-wide material stock needs into production, recycling, and final disposal flows, drawing on empirically observed stock intensities and detailed stock–flow dynamics from the MISO2 framework. This allowed them to quantify knock-on impacts for energy demand, CO2, land use, and human appropriation of net primary production.

Their results suggest that stabilizing or reducing material-related impacts requires not just cleaner production, but also structural demand-side changes that curb material stock growth. In the LMD case, energy use for key material production falls and CO2 emissions drop to about 1.1 Gt per year by 2100—roughly 15% of today’s level—yet even then, final waste still grows until around mid-century.

The study underscores a simple message for policymakers and industry: efficiency and recycling matter, but bending the curve on materials production and the accumulation of material stocks depends on building and consuming differently.

Read the full paper here.