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Achieving sustainable development requires the decoupling of natural resource use and environmental pressures from economic growth and improvements in living standards. G7 leaders and others have called for improved resource efficiency, along with inclusive economic growth and deep cuts in global greenhouse emissions. However, the outlooks for and interactions between global natural resource use, resource efficiency, economic growth and greenhouse emissions are not well understood. We use a novel multi-regional modeling framework to develop projections to 2050 under existing trends and three policy scenarios. We find that resource efficiency could provide pro-growth pro-environment policies with global benefits of USD $2.4 trillion in 2050, and ease the politics of shifting towards sustainability. Under existing trends, resource extraction is projected to increase 119% from 2015 to 2050, from 84 to 184 billion tonnes per annum, while greenhouse gas emissions increase 41%, both driven by the value of global economic activity more than doubling. Resource efficiency and greenhouse abatement slow the growth of global resource extraction, so that in 2050 it is up to 28% lower than in existing trends. Resource efficiency reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 15–20% in 2050, with global emissions falling to 63% below 2015 levels when combined with a 2 °C emissions pathway. In contrast to greenhouse abatement, resource efficiency boosts near-term economic growth. These economic gains more than offset the near-term costs of shifting to a 2 °C emissions pathway, resulting in emissions in 2050 well below current levels, slower growth in resource extractions, and faster economic growth.

CITATION: Bergesen, J. D., et al. 2017. Environmental and natural resource implications of sustainable urban infrastructure systems. Environmental Research Letters, 12(12):1-13, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/aa98ca.

Over two centuries of economic growth have put undeniable pressure on the ecological systems that underpin human well-being. While it is agreed that these pressures are increasing, views divide on how they may be alleviated. Some suggest technological advances will automatically keep us from transgressing key environmental thresholds; others that policy reform can reconcile economic and ecological goals; while a third school argues that only a fundamental shift in societal values can keep human demands within the Earth's ecological limits. Here we use novel integrated analysis of the energy-water-food nexus, rural land use (including biodiversity), material flows and climate change to explore whether mounting ecological pressures in Australia can be reversed, while the population grows and living standards improve. We show that, in the right circumstances, economic and environmental outcomes can be decoupled. Although economic growth is strong across all scenarios, environmental performance varies widely: pressures are projected to more than double, stabilize or fall markedly by 2050. However, we find no evidence that decoupling will occur automatically. Nor do we find that a shift in societal values is required. Rather, extensions of current policies that mobilize technology and incentivize reduced pressure account for the majority of differences in environmental performance. Our results show that Australia can make great progress towards sustainable prosperity, if it chooses to do so.

Humanity faces three large challenges over the coming decades: urbanisation and industrialisation in developing countries at unprecedented levels; concurrently, we need to mitigate against dangerous climate change and we need to consider fi nite global boundaries regarding resource depletion. Responses to these challenges as well as models that inform strategies are fragmented. The current mainstream framework for measuring and modelling climate change mitigation focuses on the fl ows of energy and emissions and is insuffi cient for simultaneously addressing the material and infrastructure needs of development. The models’ inability to adequately represent the multiple interactions between infrastructure stocks, materials, energy and emissions results in notable limitations. They are inadequate: (1) to identify physically realistic (mass balance consistent) mitigation pathways, (2) to anticipate potentially relevant co-benefi ts and risks and thus (3) to identify the most effective strategies for linking targets for climate change mitigation with goals for sustainable development, including poverty eradication, infrastructure investment and mitigation of resource depletion. This chapter demonstrates that a metabolic approach has the potential to address urbanisation and infrastructure development and energy use and climate change, as well as resource use, and therefore to provide a framework for integrating climate change mitigation and sustainable development from a physical perspective. Metabolic approaches can represent the cross-sector coupling between material and energy use and waste (emissions) and also stocks in the anthroposphere (including fi xed assets, public and private infrastructure). Stocks moderate the supply of services such as shelter, communication, mobility, health and safety and employment opportunities. The development of anthropogenic stocks defi nes boundary conditions for industrial activity over time. By 2050 there will be an additional three billion urban dwellers, almost all of them in developing countries. If they are to receive the level of services converging on those currently experienced in developed nations, this will entail a massive investment in infrastructure and substantial quantities of steel, concrete and aluminium (materials that account for nearly half of industrial emissions). This scenario is confronted by the legacy of existing infrastructure and the limit of a cumulative carbon budget within which we could restrain global temperature rise to

Urban environmental sustainability assessment is increasingly a part of urban planning, from the perspective of mitigating local and global impacts and for adapting to regional and global resource constraints and anticipated climate events. We examine general techniques under three categories: consumption-based, metabolism-based and complex systems approaches. We sample recent and salient applications at spatial scales ranging from neighbourhoods to metropolitan regions. The scope and strengths of applications in these categories are complementary especially with regards to the attribution of impact. The first approach assesses environmental sustainability as a function of urban consumption, the second uses a more limited concept of consumption but better represents local and trans-boundary production activity and the third attributes cause and effect through quantifying relationships and feedbacks throughout the urban system.

Models used for future based scenarios should be calibrated with historical water supply and use data. Historical water records in Australia are discontinuous, incomplete, and often incongruently disaggregated. We present a systematic method to produce a coherent reconstruction of the historical provision and consumption of water in catchments of the State of Victoria. This is demonstrated using water account system WAS: an accounting and simulation tool that tracks the stocks and flows of physical quantities relating to the water system. The WAS is part of, and informed by, an integrated framework of stocks and flows calculators for simulating long-term interactions between other sectors of the physical economy. Both the WAS and related frameworks consider a wide scope of inputs regarding population, land use, energy, and water. The physical history of the water sector is reconstructed by integrating water data with these information sources using a data modeling process that resolves conflicts and deduces missing information. The WAS outputs demonstrate the water and energy implications of the treatment, delivery, and end use of water cognizant of historical records. DOI: 10.1061/ASCEWR.1943-5452.0000090 CE Database subject headings: Water supply; Calibration; Data processing; History; Australia. Author keywords: Water accounting; Stocks and flows; Historical time series; Calibration; Data modeling.

Interconnected social and environmental systems are the domain of ecological economics, and models can be used to explore feedbacks and adaptations inherent in these systems. Agent-based modeling (ABM) represents autonomous entities, each with dynamic behavior and heterogeneous characteristics. Agents interact with each other and their environment, resulting in emergent outcomes at the macroscale that can be used to quantitatively analyze complex systems. ABM is contributing to research questions in ecological economics in the areas of natural resource management and land-use change, urban systems modeling, market dynamics, changes in consumer attitudes, innovation, and diffusion of technology and management practices, commons dilemmas and self-governance, and psychological aspects to human decision making and behavior change. Frontiers for ABM research in ecological economics involve advancing the empirical calibration and validation of models through mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, participatory modeling, and, notably, experimental economics to test specific decision-making hypotheses. Linking ABM with other modeling techniques at the level of emergent properties will further advance efforts to understand dynamics of social-environmental systems.

Agent based models (ABM) and cellular automata (CA) micro-scale modeling have found abundant application in the area of urban land use and transport planning. These platforms enable a rich spatial representation of residential behavior. We present an urban ABM that deliberately emphasizes a sparse set of rules that influence agents' settlement decisions which interact with detailed spatial data on the geography and climate of a city region. Preliminary results are compared with historical data (1851 to 2001) of the urban growth of the City of Melbourne, the major urbanized area of the State of Victoria, Australia. We discuss potential extensions to the model and its value as an exploratory device for different transport and climate change scenarios.

This paper describes a water accounting system (WAS) that has been developed as an innovative new tool for strategic long-term water management. The WAS incorporates both disaggregated water use and availability, provides a comprehensive and consistent historical database, and can integrate climate and hydrological model outputs for the exploration of scenarios. It has been established and tested for the state of Victoria in Australia, and can be extended to cover other or all regions of Australia. The WAS is implemented using stock-and-flow dynamics, currently employing major river basins as the spatial units and a yearly time step. While this system shares features with system dynamics, learning is enhanced and strategic management of water resources is improved by application of a Design Approach and the structure of the WAS. We compare the WAS with other relevant accounting systems and outline its benefits, particularly the potential for resolving tensions between water supply and demand. Integrated management is facilitated by combination with other stocks and flows frameworks that provide data on key drivers such as demography, land-use and electricity production.