{"id":244109,"date":"2026-09-16T19:51:58","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T00:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/weighing-600-million-buildings-to-help-construct-a-more-efficient-future"},"modified":"2026-09-16T19:51:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T00:51:58","slug":"weighing-600-million-buildings-to-help-construct-a-more-efficient-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/weighing-600-million-buildings-to-help-construct-a-more-efficient-future","title":{"rendered":"Weighing 600 million buildings to help construct a more efficient future"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/weighing-600-million-buildings-to-help-construct-a-more-efficient-future2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A new study helps show how builders and city planners can minimize the materials needed to accommodate the planet\u2019s future population.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow we plan cities today will shape their material demand for decades,\u201d said Jinchao Song, the first author of the new study and a U-M research fellow with the School for Environment and Sustainability, or SEAS. \u201cUsing materials more efficiently can help cities accommodate future population growth while reducing the emissions associated with construction. If we use less material, we will have less energy consumption and carbon emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the study, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s44284-026-00510-3\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal <i>Nature Cities<\/i>, Song and colleagues combined high-resolution satellite imagery and other geospatial data with building material information to calculate the weight of 606 million buildings around the world. Working with experts from China, Denmark and the Netherlands, she then analyzed how economic conditions, population density and characteristics of the built environment, including urban form, were associated with material-use efficiency across cities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new study helps show how builders and city planners can minimize the materials needed to accommodate the planet\u2019s future population. \u201cHow we plan cities today will shape their material demand for decades,\u201d said Jinchao Song, the first author of the new study and a U-M research fellow with the School for Environment and Sustainability, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,1497,2028,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-energy","category-satellites","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}