Highly granular data on material stocks in the USA enable new insights into drivers of resource use

The article "Intra-settlement scaling across the urban–rural continuum: material stocks, service provisioning, and greenhouse gas emissions in the contiguous United States" has just been published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

The paper analyzes how material stocks in the built environment, service provisioning, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scale with population size across the USA, at high spatial resolution. It shows that people living in high-density urban areas require less than half of the area of buildings and infrastructures, materials in these structures, and GHG emissions than residents of low-density rural areas.

It concludes that dense settlements in the US are related to substantial environmental benefits compared to low-density patterns.