Material production accounts for 23% of all greenhouse gas emissions. More efficient use of materials – through decoupling of services that support human wellbeing from material use – is imperative as other emissions mitigation options are expensive. An interdisciplinary scientific assessment of material efficiency and its links to service provision, material cycle management, and climate policy is needed to identify effective strategies and help design the policy framework required for their implementation. We present RECC, the Resource Efficiency-Climate Change mitigation framework, a first step towards such a comprehensive assessment. RECC is based on dynamic material flow analysis and links the services provided (individual motorized transport and dwelling) to the operation of in-use stocks (passenger vehicles and residential buildings), to the expansion and maintenance of these stocks to their material cycles (major materials like steel and cement), and to energy use and climate impacts. A key innovation of RECC is the up-scaling of detailed descriptions of future product archetypes with different degrees of material and energy efficiency, which are simulated with engineering tools.We utilize RECC with augmented storylines of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP) to describe future service demand and associated material requirements. Ten material efficiency strategies at different stages of the material cycle can be assessed by ramping up their implementation rates to the identified technical potentials. RECC provides scenario results for the life cycle impacts of ambitious service-material decoupling concurrent with energy system decarbonization, giving detailed insights on the resource efficiency-climate change mitigation nexus to policy makers worldwide.
A comprehensive set of global scenarios of housing, mobility, and material efficiency for material cycles and energy systems modeling
