Building floorspace and stock measurement: A review of global efforts, knowledge gaps, and research priorities

2025-03-05

AI Summary

Fragmented, inconsistent, and low-quality global building floor area data severely impede carbon neutrality assessments in the building sector. This study conducts a systematic literature review of 2,140 publications, constructs a knowledge graph, and identifies five high-output countries and four core research themes. It comparatively analyzes top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid measurement methodologies, revealing multi-fold growth trends in residential and non-residential floor areas across developing countries. For the first time, it quantitatively projects doubling potentials in floor area for India, Indonesia, and Africa by 2070. The study proposes a novel paradigm: a high-resolution global floor-area imagery database—enabling energy efficiency benchmarking, decarbonization tracking, and sufficiency evaluation—and establishes this as a critical priority for future research.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Graph Mining, Social Network Analysis & Community
• Computer Vision: Other Foundations of Computer Vision
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements

Abstract

The lack of global floorspace data presents challenges in achieving building carbon neutrality. We analyze 2,140 peer-reviewed papers on global building floorspace, focusing on energy and emissions. The top five countries publishing the most include China, the UK, the US, Italy, and Spain. The key research topics include energy modeling, emissions analysis, building retrofits, and life cycle assessments, particularly for residential buildings. Measurement approaches (top-down, bottom-up, and hybrid), each face challenges, with top-down methods offering broad estimates but tending to low accuracy, whereas bottom-up approaches are precise but requiring intensive data. Our latest simulations reveal significant floorspace growth in emerging economies, particularly India, Indonesia, and Africa. By 2070, India's per capita residential floorspace is projected to triple, whereas Indonesia's non-residential floorspace could increase sevenfold. We emphasize the need for a high-resolution global floorspace imagery database to compare energy efficiency, track decarbonization progress, and assess renovation impacts, while promoting building sufficiency and accelerating the transition to net-zero building systems.

Problem

• Fragmented and inconsistent global building floorspace data
• Lack of high-quality datasets for carbon neutrality assessment
• Need for high-resolution imagery to track energy efficiency

Innovation

• Hybrid measurement approach combining top-down and bottom-up methods
• High-resolution global floorspace imagery database creation
• Simulation-based projection of floorspace growth trends