Embodied impacts of Australian building materials highlight trade-offs for sustainability policy

The environmental footprint of the built environment extends far beyond carbon, yet urban planning often lacks the spatially explicit, multi-dimensional data needed to address the full scope of the planetary crisis. Analyzing 13.76 million Australian buildings via life cycle assessment, we quantify a 3.11 billion metric ton embodied material stock and assess impacts across resource depletion, pollution, and toxicity. Our findings reveal critical trade-offs in urban form: single-family homes have lower per-unit impacts but drive sprawl, while high-rise buildings conserve land but concentrate environmental burdens. Spatially, suburban areas account for the majority (∼60%) of the total national impact, yet urban and industrial zones are hotspots for specific harms like mineral depletion and human toxicity. These results demonstrate that effective sustainability strategies for the built environment must be spatially targeted, deploying distinct policies to address the challenges of suburban scale versus urban intensity.