Abstract
Earthquakes represent a significant but often overlooked environmental burden in the construction sector, driven by post-disaster repairs and reconstruction that generate substantial carbon emissions. Here, we unveil the environmental toll of earthquakes in Europe by presenting a seismic risk map of embodied carbon associated with earthquake damage across residential, commercial, and industrial buildings. We develop a harmonised database of material quantities and carbon factors covering diverse construction materials and building types, which we integrate into a continental-scale probabilistic seismic risk model. Our analysis reveals that Europe’s building stock embodies nearly 14 billion tonnes of CO₂e, with seismic damage, based on over three million earthquake scenarios, contributing an average of 6.6 million tonnes annually. These values are comparable to the yearly emissions of millions of cars or tens of thousands of transatlantic flights. Our models and datasets offer a scalable, transferable tool to incorporate sustainability into disaster risk reduction and advance climate-resilient development.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during the study are available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/gem/global_embodied_carbon_model. Higher-resolution embodied carbon exposure and risk models are available upon request. Source Data are provided in this paper. Source data are provided with this paper.
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M.C. and V.S. conceived the study and designed the methodology workflow. M.C. and K.A. gathered and harmonised all the embodied carbon data and calculated the replacement embodied carbon and the average annual embodied carbon across Europe. A.M.N. estimated quantities of non-structural components. V.S. prepared all the maps. V.S. and C.G. supervised the work. All authors contributed to and revised the writing of the manuscript.
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Caruso, M., Silva, V., Aljawhari, K. et al. Unveiling the environmental impact of earthquakes in Europe. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68120-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68120-6
