ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Global scenarios of urban density and its impacts on building energy use through 2050.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed.
- Patterns, drivers, and trends of urban cooling demand across global cities.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Mitigating Hidden Climate Change Impacts of Timber Cities Critically Depends on Proactive Forest and Waste Management.Environmental science & technology · 2026Article
- Urban-scale facade material mapping from street view images using vision-language models for circular construction planning.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The nonlinear relationship between urban design form and energy efficiency.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Global increases in built-up volume indicate more divergent and less dispersed urban expansion patterns.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Impact of urban density on human well-being and sustainable development in Delhi, India.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- FU3D: the first global projections of future urban three-dimensional (3D) expansion for the 21st century under shared socioeconomic pathways.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Exploring the role of entertainment transition in mitigating consumption-side GHG emissions.iScience · 2025Article
- Global land and carbon consequences of mass timber products.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Unlocking global carbon reduction potential by embracing low-carbon lifestyles.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Decarbonization Potential of Global Fired Clay Brick Production.Environmental science & technology · 2025Article
- Scenario analysis of supply- and demand-side solutions for circular economy and climate change mitigation in the global building sector.Journal of industrial ecology · 2024Article
- A cost-effective climate mitigation pathway for China with co-benefits for sustainability.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Impacts of climate change, population growth, and power sector decarbonization on urban building energy use.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Built structures influence patterns of energy demand and CONature communications · 2023Article
- Global 30 meters spatiotemporal 3D urban expansion dataset from 1990 to 2010.Scientific data · 2023Article
- Satellite mapping of urban built-up heights reveals extreme infrastructure gaps and inequalities in the Global South.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Cement substitution with secondary materials can reduce annual global CONature communications · 2022Article
- Exploring Built-Up Indices and Machine Learning Regressions for Multi-Temporal Building Density Monitoring Based on Landsat Series.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Although the scale of impending urbanization is well-acknowledged, we have a limited understanding of how urban forms will change and what their impact will be on building energy use. Using both top-down and bottom-up approaches and scenarios, we examine building energy use for heating and cooling. Globally, the energy use for heating and cooling by the middle of the century will be between 45 and 59 exajoules per year (corresponding to an increase of 7-40% since 2010). Most of this variability is due to the uncertainty in future urban densities of rapidly growing cities in Asia and particularly China. Dense urban development leads to less urban energy use overall. Waiting to retrofit the existing built environment until markets are ready in about 5 years to widely deploy the most advanced renovation technologies leads to more savings in building energy use. Potential for savings in energy use is greatest in China when coupled with efficiency gains. Advanced efficiency makes the least difference compared with the business-as-usual scenario in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa but significantly contributes to energy savings in North America and Europe. Systemic efforts that focus on both urban form, of which urban density is an indicator, and energy-efficient technologies, but that also account for potential co-benefits and trade-offs with human well-being can contribute to both local and global sustainability. Particularly in growing cities in the developing world, such efforts can improve the well-being of billions of urban residents and contribute to mitigating climate change by reducing energy use in urban areas.
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