Humanity’s role in changing the face of the earth is a long-standing concern, as is the human domination of ecosystems. Geologists are debating the introduction of a new geological epoch, the ‘anthropocene’, as humans are ‘overwhelming the great forces of nature’. In this context, accumulating artifacts, i.e., human-made physical objects, is a pervasive phenomenon. Variously dubbed ‘manufactured capital’, ‘technomass’, ‘human-made mass’, ‘in-use stocks’ or ‘socioeconomic material stocks’, they have become a major focus of sustainability sciences in the last decade. Globally, the mass of socioeconomic material stocks now exceeds 10e14 kg, which is roughly equal to the dry-matter equivalent of all biomass on earth. It doubles approximately every 20 years, almost perfectly in line with ‘real’ (i.e., inflation-adjusted) GDP. In terms of mass, buildings and infrastructures (here collectively called ‘built structures’) represent the overwhelming majority of all socioeconomic material stocks.
This repository features code used for generating and analyzing material stock data as presented in:
D. Frantz, F. Schug, D. Wiedenhofer, A. Baumgart, D. Virág, S. Cooper, C. Gomez-Medina, F. Lehmann, T. Udelhoven, S. van der Linden, P. Hostert, H. Haberl. Weighing the US Economy: Map of Built Structures Unveils Patterns in Human-Dominated Landscapes. In prep
For further information, please visit the main public data repository, browse through our web-viewer, or visit our website to learn more about our project MAT_STOCKS - Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society.
All scripts require that the working directory is the main directory of this repository.
Funding This research was primarily funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (MAT_STOCKS, grant agreement No 741950).