Scientists have mapped all 2.75 billion buildings on Earth.

Geographers and specialists in remote sensing of the Earth have presented the first open and globally complete map of all buildings on the planet, including about 2.75 billion buildings. This was reported in the Earth System Science Data (EESD) journal.

An international team of scientists has developed the GlobalBuildingAtlas project, a dataset that for the first time combines building contours, their height and three—dimensional models of the LoD1 level of detail on a global scale. According to the researchers, the project has become the most comprehensive catalog of the built environment: compared to previous databases, it includes more than 1 billion more buildings.

To create the atlas, the scientists used optical satellite images from PlanetScope and machine learning algorithms, which allowed them to obtain elevation maps that are about 30 times more accurate than existing global solutions.

The new atlas shows that the built-up environment of the Earth is extremely unevenly distributed. The largest number of buildings is concentrated in Asia — about 1.22 billion, while in Africa, low-rise and small-sized buildings predominate with a large number of buildings. The authors emphasize that taking into account the height and volume of buildings provides a more accurate picture of how people actually use urban space than traditional two-dimensional maps of buildings.

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According to the researchers, GlobalBuildingAtlas can be used to monitor sustainable urban development, assess infrastructure imbalances, and track the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, the volume of buildings makes it possible to more accurately analyze the ratio of population growth and land development, as well as identify global and regional inequalities in the level of development.

The developers specify that the data set is publicly available and can be updated regularly, which makes it a tool for long-term monitoring of changes in the urban environment around the world.

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On December 11, American Time magazine recognized developers who create and train artificial intelligence (AI) as the "Person of the Year". The publication emphasized that 2025 was the year when the full potential of neural networks was fully revealed and "it became clear that there was no turning back."

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