The building and construction (BC) sector is key for climate mitigation due to its high greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, long-lived assets, and cumulative life-cycle effects. This study presents a systematic review of 109 scientific and policy publications on GHG quantification and modeling of mitigation pathways for Germany’s BC sector, covering economy-wide and building-level approaches. The focus on Germany reflects the availability of a comprehensive statistical framework, including national GHG inventories, environmental-economic accounts, and building stock typologies, enabling cross-scale analysis. The findings show that existing approaches offer complementary perspectives but remain methodologically fragmented across scales and system levels. Top-down models align with national inventories, carbon budgets, and supply-chain emissions at aggregated sectoral scales and are primarily dominated by operational energy perspectives. Whereas bottom-up approaches resolve technological detail, stock dynamics, and embodied emissions at the building and material levels, they are often based on static typological representations and lack consistency with carbon-budget logic, sector definitions, and inventory structures. Consequently, mitigation pathways exhibit structural mismatches between targets and carbon budgets, between system boundaries and life-cycle coverage, and between sector- and building-level metrics. This review, therefore, defines key requirements for hybrid frameworks, including consistent sector definitions, life-cycle-based boundaries, carbon-budget alignment, and the integration of stock dynamics with economy-wide accounting.
Kaya et al. (Sun,) studied this question.