A comprehensive set of global scenarios of housing, mobility, and material efficiency for material cycles and energy systems modelling

Scenario-based assessments are a useful tool to explore unknown futures and inform decision makers and the general public of the consequences of different courses of action. Scenario developments in Industrial Ecology (IE) have focused on disparate components of the socioeconomic metabolism and case studies, and few efforts of comprehensive and cumulative scenario formulation are documented. Many important, empirically derived relationships between material cycles, end-use services, and energy use are relevant to global scenario modeling efforts, e.g. of integrated assessment models (IAMs), which do not routinely describe material cycles or the life-cycle impacts of various technology shifts. These gaps hinder the assessment of sustainable development strategies such as demand-side sufficiency, material efficiency, and energy efficiency. We developed scenarios for comprehensive assessment of material cycles and associated environmental impacts linked to demand for service provisioning of dwelling area and personal transport. We formulated three scenarios for 20 global regions based on the Low Energy Demand (LED) and Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP1 and SSP2) narratives with corresponding material efficiency strategy implementation potentials. While climate change mitigation scenarios are usually formulated as counterfactual scenarios, none of them center on service provision and material cycles at this level of detail. The explicit storyline extension approach presented here is a novel alternative to the aggregate GDP or time-driven extrapolations of service or energy demands. We describe the scenario formulation processes, resulting parameters, their applications, and offer an outlook for prospective sustainability models.