Search

Growing demand for minerals continues to drive deforestation worldwide. Tropical forests are particularly vulnerable to the environmental impacts of mining and mineral processing. Many local- to regional-scale studies document extensive, long-lasting impacts of mining on biodiversity and ecosystem services. However, the full scope of deforestation induced by industrial mining across the tropics is yet unknown. Here, we present a biome-wide assessment to show where industrial mine expansion has caused the most deforestation from 2000 to 2019. We find that 3,264 km2 of forest was directly lost due to industrial mining, with 80% occurring in only four countries: Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana, and Suriname. Additionally, controlling for other nonmining determinants of deforestation, we find that mining caused indirect forest loss in two-thirds of the investigated countries. Our results illustrate significant yet unevenly distributed and often unmanaged impacts on these biodiverse ecosystems. Impact assessments and mitigation plans of industrial mining activities must address direct and indirect impacts to support conservation of the world’s tropical forests.

Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is a threat to global climate, biodiversity, and many other ecosystem services. In order to address this threat, an understanding of the drivers of deforestation processes is required. Spillover effects and factors that differ across locations and over time play important roles in these processes. They are largely disregarded in applied research and thus in the design of evidence-based policies. In this study, we model connectivity between regions and consider heterogeneous effects to gain more accurate quantitative insights into the inherent complexity of deforestation. We investigate the impacts of agriculture in Mato Grosso, Brazil, for the period 2006–2017 considering spatial spillovers and varying impacts over time and space. Spillovers between municipalities that emanate from croplands in the Amazon appear as the major driver of deforestation, with no direct effects from agriculture in recent years. This suggests a moderate success of the Soy Moratorium and Cattle Agreements, but highlights their inability to address indirect effects. We find that the neglect of the spatial dimension and the assumption of homogeneous impacts lead to distorted inference. Researchers need to be aware of the complex and dynamic processes behind deforestation, in order to facilitate effective policy design.

Global supply chains shift environmental and social impacts of consumption to remote locations. This opacity challenges many sustainability goals. To help businesses and governments realize more sustainable supply chains, new approaches are using spatial data and machine-learning techniques to connect Earth observation data to conventional economic tools.

Sustainable development depends on decoupling economic growth from resource use. The material footprint indicator accounts for environmental pressure related to a country’s final demand. It measures material use across global supply-chain networks linking production and consumption. For this reason, it has been used as an indicator for two Sustainable Development Goals: 8.4 ‘resource efficiency improvements’ and 12.2 ‘sustainable management of natural resources’. Currently, no reporting facility exists that provides global, detailed and timely information on countries’ material footprints. We present a new collaborative research platform, based on multiregional input–output analysis, that enables countries to regularly produce, update and report detailed global material footprint accounts and monitor progress towards Sustainable Development Goals 8.4 and 12.2. We show that the global material footprint has quadrupled since 1970, driven mainly by emerging economies in the Asia-Pacific region, but with an indication of plateauing since 2014. Capital investments increasingly dominate over household consumption as the main driver. At current trends, absolute decoupling is unlikely to occur over the next few decades. The new collaborative research platform allows to elevate the material footprint to Tier I status in the SDG indicator framework and paves the way to broaden application of the platform to other environmental footprint indicators.

The area used for mineral extraction is a key indicator for understanding and mitigating the environmental impacts caused by the extractive sector. To date, worldwide data products on mineral extraction do not report the area used by mining activities. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by presenting a new data set of mining extents derived by visual interpretation of satellite images. We delineated mining areas within a 10 km buffer from the approximate geographical coordinates of more than six thousand active mining sites across the globe. The result is a global-scale data set consisting of 21,060 polygons that add up to 57,277 km2. The polygons cover all mining above-ground features that could be identified from the satellite images, including open cuts, tailings dams, waste rock dumps, water ponds, and processing infrastructure. The data set is available for download from 10.1594/PANGAEA.910894 and visualization at www.fineprint.global/viewer., Measurement(s) terrestrial mining Technology Type(s) satellite imaging Sample Characteristic - Environment land Sample Characteristic - Location Earth (planet) Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data: 10.6084/m9.figshare.12594248

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M Input-output analysis is one of the central methodological pillars of industrial ecology. However, the literature that discusses different structures of environmental extensions (EEs), that is, the scope of physical flows and their attribution to sectors in the monetary input-output table (MIOT), remains fragmented. This article investigates the conceptual and empirical implications of applying two different but frequently used designs of EEs, using the case of energy accounting, where one represents energy supply while the other energy use in the economy. We derive both extensions from an official energy supply-use dataset and apply them to the same single-region input-output (SRIO) model of Austria, thereby isolating the effect that stems from the decision for the extension design. We also crosscheck the SRIO results with energy footprints from the global multi-regional input-output (GMRIO) dataset EXIOBASE. Our results show that the ranking of footprints of final demand categories (e.g., household and export) is sensitive to the extension design and that product-level results can vary by several orders of magnitude. The GMRIO-based comparison further reveals that for a few countries the supply-extension result can be twice the size of the use-extension footprint (e.g., Australia and Norway). We propose a graph approach to provide a generalized framework to disclosing the design of EEs. We discuss the conceptual differences between the two extension designs by applying analogies to hybrid life-cycle assessment and conclude that our findings are relevant for monitoring of energy efficiency and emission reduction targets and corporate footprint accounting.

Most countries show a relative decoupling of economic growth from domestic resource use, implying increased resource efficiency. However, international trade facilitates the exchange of products between regions with disparate resource productivity. Hence, for an understanding of resource efficiency from a consumption perspective that takes into account the impacts in the upstream supply chains, there is a need to assess the environmental pressures embodied in trade. We use EXIOBASE3, a new multiregional input-output database, to examine the rate of increase in resource efficiency, and investigate the ways in which international trade contributes to the displacement of pressures on the environment from the consumption of a population. We look at the environmental pressures of energy use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, material use, water use, and land use. Material use stands out as the only indicator growing in both absolute and relative terms to population and gross domestic product (GDP), while land use is the only indicator showing absolute decoupling from both references. Energy, GHG, and water use show relative decoupling. As a percentage of total global environmental pressure, we calculate the net impact displaced through trade rising from 23% to 32% for material use (1995?2011), 23% to 26% for water use, 20% to 29% for energy use, 20% to 26% for land use, and 19% to 24% for GHG emissions. The results show a substantial disparity between trade-related impacts for Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD countries. At the product group level, we observe the most rapid growth in environmental footprints in clothing and footwear. The analysis points to implications for future policies aiming to achieve environmental targets, while fully considering potential displacement effects through international trade.

This paper serves as an introduction to this special issue on the use of multiregional input- output modeling in assessments of natural resource use and resource use efficiency. Due to globalization, growth in trade has outpaced growth in global gross domestic product (GDP). As a consequence, impacts of consumption of a country increasingly take place abroad. Various methods have been developed to perform so-called footprint analyses. We argue that global multiregional input-output (GMRIO) analysis has the largest potential to provide a consistent accounting framework to calculate a variety of different footprint indicators. The state of the art in GMRIO has, however, various shortcomings, such as limited sector and regional detail and incomplete extensions. The work presented in this special issue addresses a number of such problems and how to possibly overcome them, focusing on the construction of a new GMRIO database (EXIOBASE V3). This database includes long time series in both current and constant prices, a high level of product and sector detail, a physical representation of the world economy, and allows analyzing which footprints out of the many possible indicators provide most information for policy making. Various options for empirical analyses are presented in this special issue. Finally, we analyze how GMRIOs can be further standardized and gradually moved from the scientific to the official statistical domain.

Global multiregional input-output databases (GMRIOs) became the standard tool for track ing environmental impacts through global supply chains. To date, several GMRIOs are available, but the numerical results differ. This paper considers how GMRIOs can be made more robust and authoritative. We show that GMRIOs need detail in environmentally relevant sectors. On the basis of a review of earlier work, we conclude that the highest uncertainty in footprint analyses is caused by the environmental data used in a GMRIO, followed by the size of country measured in gross domestic product (GDP) as fraction of the global total, the structure of the national table, and only at the end the structure of trade. We suggest the following to enhance robustness of results. In the short term, we recommend using the Single country National Accounts Consistent footprint approach, that uses official data for extensions and the national table for the country in question, combined with embodiments in imports calculated using a GMRIO. In a time period of 2 to 3 years, we propose work on harmonized environmental data for water, carbon, materials, and land, and use the aggregated Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Inter-Country Input-Output GMRIO as default in combination with detailing procedures developed in, for example, the EXIOBASE and Eora projects. In the long term, solutions should be coordinated by the international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) Statistical Division, OECD, and Eurostat. This could ensure that when input-output tables and trade data of individual countries are combined, that the global totals are consistent and that bilateral trade asymmetries are resolved.

Environmentally extended multiregional input-output (EE MRIO) tables have emerged as a key framework to provide a comprehensive description of the global economy and analyze its effects on the environment. Of the available EE MRIO databases, EXIOBASE stands out as a database compatible with the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) with a high sectorial detail matched with multiple social and environmental satellite accounts. In this paper, we present the latest developments realized with EXIOBASE 3—a time series of EE MRIO tables ranging from 1995 to 2011 for 44 countries (28 EU member plus 16 major economies) and five rest of the world regions. EXIOBASE 3 builds upon the previous versions of EXIOBASE by using rectangular supply-use tables (SUTs) in a 163 industry by 200 products classification as the main building blocks. In order to capture structural changes, economic developments, as reported by national statistical agencies, were imposed on the available, disaggregated SUTs from EXIOBASE 2. These initial estimates were further refined by incorporating detailed data on energy, agricultural production, resource extraction, and bilateral trade. EXIOBASE 3 inherits the high level of environmental stressor detail from its precursor, with further improvement in the level of detail for resource extraction. To account for the expansion of the European Union (EU), EXIOBASE 3 was developed with the full EU28 country set (including the new member state Croatia). EXIOBASE 3 provides a unique tool for analyzing the dynamics of environmental pressures of economic activities over time.

Summary The international industrial ecology (IE) research community and United Nations (UN) Environment have, for the first time, agreed on an authoritative and comprehensive data set for global material extraction and trade covering 40 years of global economic activity and natural resource use. This new data set is becoming the standard information source for decision making at the UN in the context of the post-2015 development agenda, which acknowledges the strong links between sustainable natural resource management, economic prosperity, and human well-being. Only if economic growth and human development can become substantially decoupled from accelerating material use, waste, and emissions can the tensions inherent in the Sustainable Development Goals be resolved and inclusive human development be achieved. In this paper, we summarize the key findings of the assessment study to make the IE research community aware of this new global research resource. The global results show a massive increase in materials extraction from 22 billion tonnes (Bt) in 1970 to 70 Bt in 2010, and an acceleration in material extraction since 2000. This acceleration has occurred at a time when global population growth has slowed and global economic growth has stalled. The global surge in material extraction has been driven by growing wealth and consumption and accelerating trade. A material footprint perspective shows that demand for materials has grown even in the wealthiest parts of the world. Low-income countries have benefited least from growing global resource availability and have continued to deliver primary materials to high-income countries while experiencing few improvements in their domestic material living standards. Material efficiency, the amount of primary materials required per unit of economic activity, has declined since around 2000 because of a shift of global production from very material-efficient economies to less-efficient ones. This global trend of recoupling economic activity with material use, driven by industrialization and urbanization in the global South, most notably Asia, has negative impacts on a suite of environmental and social issues, including natural resource depletion, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and uneven economic development. This research is a good example of the IE research community providing information for evidence-based policy making on the global stage and testament to the growing importance of IE research in achieving global sustainable development.

Bioeconomy strategies in high income societies focus at replacing finite, fossil resources by renewable, biological resources to reconcile macro-economic concerns with climate constraints. However, the current bioeconomy is associated with critical levels of environmental degradation. As a potential increase in biological resource use may further threaten the capacity of ecosystems to fulfil human needs, it remains unclear whether bioeconomy transitions in high income countries are sustainable. In order to fill a gap in bioeconomy sustainability assessments, we apply an ontological lens of coupled social-ecological systems to explore critical mechanisms in relation to bioeconomy activities in the global resource system. This contributes to a social-ecological systems (SES)-based understanding of sustainability from a high income country perspective: the capacity of humans to satisfy their needs with strategies that reduce current levels of pressures and impacts on ecosystems. Building on this notion of agency, we develop a framework prototype that captures the systemic relation between individual human needs and collective social outcomes on the one hand (micro-level) and social-ecological impacts in the global resource system on the other hand (macro-level). The BIO-SES framework emphasizes the role of responsible consumption (for physical health), responsible production (to reduce stressors on the environment), and the role of autonomy and self-organisation (to protect the reproduction capacity of social-ecological systems). In particular, the BIO-SES framework can support (1) individual and collective agency in high income country contexts to reduce global resource use and related ecosystem impacts with a bioeconomy strategy, (2) aligning social outcomes, monitoring efforts and governance structures with place-based efforts to achieve the SDGs, as well as (3), advancing the evidence base and social-ecological theory on responsible bioeconomy transitions in the limited biosphere.

Understanding the environmental implications of consumption and production depends on appropriate monitoring tools. Material flow accounting (MFA) is a method to monitor natural resource use by countries and has been widely used in research and policy. However, the increasing globalization requires the consideration of 'embodied' material use of traded products. The indicator raw material consumption (RMC) represents the material use - no matter where in the world it occurs - associated with domestic final demand. It provides a consumption-based perspective complementary to the MFA indicators that have a territorial focus. Several studies on RMC have been presented recently but with diverging results; hence, a better understanding of the underlying differences is needed. This article presents a comparison of Austrian RMC for the year 2007 calculated by six different approaches (3 multi-regional input-output (MRIO) and 3 hybrid life-cycle analysis-IO approaches). Five approaches result in an RMC higher than the domestic material consumption (DMC). One hybrid LCA-IO approach calculates RMC to be lower than DMC. For specific material categories, results diverge by 50% or more. Due to the policy relevance of the RMC and DMC indicators it is paramount that their robustness is enhanced, which needs both data and method harmonization.

Responsible water management in an era of globalised supply chains needs to consider both local and regional water balances and international trade. In this paper, we assess the water footprints of total final demand in the EU-27 at a very detailed product level and spatial scale—an important step towards informed water policy. We apply the multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model EXIOBASE, including water data, to track the distribution of water use along product supply chains within and across countries. This enables the first spatially-explicit MRIO analysis of water embodied in Europe’s external trade for almost 11,000 watersheds world-wide, tracing indirect (“virtual”) water consumption in one country back to those watersheds where the water was actually extracted. We show that the EU-27 indirectly imports large quantities of blue and green water via international trade of products, most notably processed crop products, and these imports far exceed the water used from domestic sources. The Indus, Danube and Mississippi watersheds are the largest individual contributors to the EU-27’s final water consumption, which causes large environmental impacts due to water scarcity in both the Indus and Mississippi watersheds. We conclude by sketching out policy options to ensure that sustainable water management within and outside European borders is not compromised by European consumption.

Mining activities induce profound changes to societies and the environment they inhabit. With global extraction of metal ores doubling over the past two decades, pressures related to mining have dramatically increased. In this paper, we explore where growing global metal extraction has particularly taken effect. Using fine-grain data, we investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of mining of nine metal ores (bauxite, copper, gold, iron, lead, manganese, nickel, silver and zinc) across approximately 3,000 sites of extraction worldwide between 2000 and 2019. To approach the related environmental implications, we intersect mining sites with terrestrial biomes, protected areas, and watersheds categorised by water availability. We find that 79% of global metal ore extraction in 2019 originated from five of the six most species-rich biomes, with mining volumes doubling since 2000 in tropical moist forest ecosystems. We also find that half of global metal ore extraction took place at 20 km or less from protected territories. Further, 90% of all considered extraction sites correspond to below-average relative water availability, with particularly copper and gold mining occurring in areas with significant water scarcity. Our study has far-reaching implications for future global and local policy and resource management responses to mitigate the negative effects of the expected expansion of metal mining.

A new approach to allocate environmental responsibility, the "value added-based responsibility" allocation, is presented in this article. This metric allocates total environmental pressures occurring along an international supply chain to the participating sectors and countries according to the share of value added they generate within that specific supply chain. We show that - due to their position in global value chains - certain sectors (e.g. services) and countries (e.g. Germany) receive significantly greater responsibility compared to other allocation approaches. This adds a new perspective to the discussions concerning a fair distribution of mitigation costs among nations, companies and consumers.

The relationship between economic affluence, quality of life and environmental implications of production and consumption activities is a recurring issue in sustainability discussions. A number of studies examined selected relationships, but the general implications for future development directions of countries at different development stages are hardly addressed. In this paper, we use a global dataset with 173 countries to assess the overall relationship between resource footprints, quality of life and economic development over the period of 1990-2015. We select the Material Footprint and Carbon Footprint and contrast them with the Human Development Index, the Happiness Index and GDP per capita. Regression analyses show that the relationship between various resource footprints and quality of life generally follows a logarithmic path of development, while resource footprints and GDP per capita are linearly connected. From the empirical results, we derive a generalised path of development and cluster countries along this path. Within this comprehensive framework, we discuss options to change the path to respect planetary and social boundaries through a combination of resource efficiency increases, substitution of industries and sufficiency of consumption. We conclude that decoupling and green growth will not realise sustainable development, if planetary boundaries have already been transgressed., Series: Ecological Economic Papers

In an increasingly globalized world with more and more distributed international supply chains, sustainability studies and policies need to consider socioeconomic and environmental interactions between distant places. Studies of the global biomass metabolism investigate physical flows between and within nature and human systems, thus providing a useful basis for understanding the interrelatedness of changes in one place with impacts elsewhere. Various methodological approaches exist for studying the human-nature metabolism and estimating the land embodied in international trade flows, a core element of assessing telecouplings in the global land system. The results of recent studies vary widely, lacking robustness and thus hampering their application in policy making. This article provides a structured overview and comparative evaluation of existing accounting methods and models for calculating land footprints. We identify differences in available accounting methods and indicate their shortcomings, which are mainly attributable to the product and supply chain coverage and detail, and biases introduced by the use of monetary flows as a proxy for actual physical flows. We suggest options for further development of global land footprint accounting methods, particularly highlighting the advantages of hybrid accounting approaches as a framework for robust and transparent assessments of the global displacement of land use.

A rapidly growing share of global agricultural areas is devoted to the production of biomass for non-food purposes. The derived products include, for example, biofuels, textiles, detergents or cosmetics. Given the far-reaching global implications of an expanding non-food bioeconomy, an assessment of the bioeconomy’s resource use from a footprint perspective is urgently needed. We determine the global cropland footprint of non-food products with a hybrid land flow accounting model combining data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and the multi-regional input-output model EXIOBASE. The globally interlinked model covers all cropland areas used for the production of crop- and animal-based non-food commodities for the years from 1995 to 2010. We analyse global patterns of raw material producers, processers and consumers of bio-based non-food products, with a particular focus on the European Union. Results illustrate that the EU is a major processer and the number one consumer region of non-food cropland, despite being only the fifth largest producing region. Two thirds of the cropland required to satisfy EU non-food consumption are located in other world regions, giving rise to a significant dependency on imported products and to potential impacts on distant ecosystems. With almost 29% in 2010, oilseed production, used to produce, for example, biofuels, detergents and polymers, represents the dominant share in the EU’s non-food cropland footprint. There is also a significant contribution of more traditional non-food biomass uses such as fibre crops (for textiles) and animal hides and skins (for leather products). Our study emphasises the importance of comprehensively assessing the implications of the non-food bioeconomy expansion as envisaged in various policy strategies, such as the Bioeconomy Strategy of the European Commission.

Part I: Understanding the resource nexus: Setting scenes The Resource Nexus: Preface and Introduction Raimund Bleischwitz, Holger Hoff, Catalina Spataru, Ester van der Voet, Stacy D. VanDeveer Appreciating wider environmental angles Kaysara Khatun and Gloria Salmoral Scales and the resource nexus Corey Johnson and Stacy D. VanDeveer Security, climate change and the resource nexus Bassel Daher, Sanghyun Lee, Rabi H. Mohtar, Jeremiah O. Asaka and Stacy D. VanDeveer Part II: Analysing the resource nexus: Tools and metrics Life Cycle Assessment for resource nexus analysis Ester van der Voet and Jeroen B. Guinee Linking society and nature: material flows and the resource nexus Anke Schaffartzik and Dominik Wiedenhofer Resource footprints Stefan Giljum, Martin Bruckner and Stephan Lutter Input-Output analysis and resource nexus assessment Arnold Tukker and David Font Vivanco Material criticality assessment and resource nexus analysis Gavin M. Mudd Industrial Ecology Methods and the Resource Nexus Ester van der Voet Part III: Resource nexus modelling: Practices and future transformations Integrating environmental and social impacts with Ecosystem services analysis Perrine Hamel, Benjamin Bryant, Becky Chaplin-Kramer and Adrian Vogl Modelling practices from local to global Enrique Kremers, Andreas Koch and Jochen Wendel Global change and K-waves: exploring nexus patterns Markku Wilenius Foresight and scenarios: modelling practices and resource nexus assessment Gerd Ahlert, Martin Distelkamp and Mark Meyer Extending macro-economic modelling into the resource nexus Alvaro Calzadilla and Ramiro Parrado The five-node resource nexus dynamics: an integrated modelling approach Catalina Spataru Part IV: International political economy and the resource nexus The resource nexus in an uncertain world: a non-equilibrium perspective Shilpi Srivastava and Jeremy Allouche Mining and the resource nexus David Humphreys Scarcities, supply and new resource curses? Raimund Bleischwitz and Jun Rentschler The international commodity trade: Stylized facts Vincenzo de Lipsis, Paolo Agnolucci and Raimund Bleischwitz Rare Earth Elements and a resource nexus perspective Eva Bartekova Governing land in the Global South Julia Tomei and Darshini Ravindranath Part V: Applying the resource nexus: Regional and Global Scale Elements of the Water-Energy-Food nexus in China Philip Andrews-Speed and Carole Dalin The Energy-Materials nexus: the case of metals Ester v.d Voet, Rene Kleijn and Gavin M. Mudd Unconventional oil and gas production meets the resource nexus Tim Boersma and Philip Andrews-Speed Feeding Africa: Nexus-related opportunities, challenges and policy options Timothy O. Williams, Fred Kizito and Marloes M. Mul The five node resource nexus at sea Tundi Agardy Part VI: Governing the resource nexus: Emerging responses Urban metabolism and new urban governance Corey Johnson Eco-innovation and resource nexus challenges: Ambitions and evidence Michal Miedzinski, Will McDowall and Raimund Bleischwitz Green Chemistry: Opportunities, waste and food supply chains Avtar Matharu, Eduardo Melo and Joseph A. Houghton California Innovations @ WEN Blas L. Perez Henriquez The UN, Global Governance and the SDGs Maria Ivanova and Natalia Escobar-Pemberthy

Today’s most pressing environmental problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, land cover conversion, etc. are caused by the overall growth of production and consumption. For a methodologically sound and comprehensive measurement of societal resource use and its environmental, economic and social impacts as well as for monitoring progress towards defined targets, appropriate indicators are needed. In addition to the territorial indicators currently in use, such indicators take into account resources “embodied” in traded goods and services. These “footprint-type indicators” help understand to what extent a country’s economy, the environment, and the resource efficiency performance of goods and services are influenced by global value chains. In this book chapter we discuss the state of the art of data and indicator development focussing on three different types of natural resources – raw materials, land, and water. First an overview of methodological options regarding environmental accounting frameworks as well as the calculation of footprint-type indicators is provided. We show empirical trends of resource use and analyse to what extent drivers of global resource use such as the European Union have managed to decouple their economic development from resource use. Methodological requirements and necessary next developments are identified and the ongoing processes as well as empirical analyses linked to the question of how targets for sustainable resource use can be identified in both regards, to the methodological as well as institutional level.

Material flow-based indicators play an important role in indicator sets related to green and resource-efficient growth. This paper examines the global flows of materials and the amounts of materials directly and indirectly necessary to satisfy domestic final demand in different countries world-wide. We calculate the indicator Raw Material Consumption (RMC), also referred to as Material Footprint (MF), by applying a global, multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model based on the GTAP database and extended by material extraction data. We examine world-wide patterns of material extraction and materials embodied in trade and consumption, investigating changes between 1997 and 2007. We find that flows of materials related to international trade have increased by almost 60% between 1997 and 2007. We show that the differences in Material Footprints per capita are huge, ranging from up to 100 tonnes in the rich, oil-exporting countries to values as low as 1.5 to 2 tonnes in some developing countries. We also quantify the differences between the indicators Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) and RMC, illustrating that net material exporters generally have a DMC larger than RMC, while the reverse is observed for net importers. Finally, we confirm the fact that most countries with stable or declining DMCs actually show increasing RMCs, indicating the occurrence of leakage effects, which are not fully captured by DMC. This challenges the world-wide use of DMC as a headline indicator for national material consumption and calls for the consideration of upstream material requirements of international trade flows.

Many of today’s most urgent environmental problems are related to the increasing volumes of worldwide production and consumption and the associated use of natural resources. Solid indicators to measure different dimensions of anthropogenic resource use are essential for designing appropriate policy measures for a sustainable management of these resources. Based on a brief review of the current state of the art of resource use indicators, this chapter describes a set of complementary environmental indicators, combining existing measures for the use of materials, water and land as well as emissions of greenhouse gases. This set can be applied consistently from the micro level of products and companies up to the macro level of countries and world regions, where all suggested indicators take a life cycle perspective on production and consumption activities. The set of indicators deals with the issue of the overall scale of the human production and consumption system and can be regarded as a framework of pressure indicators, based on which indicators on different environmental impacts can be derived. Moreover, these pressure indicators are considered as appropriate proxies for the human impact on the environment. The described set of indicators thus covers natural resource use in a comprehensive and complementary manner and can serve as a basis for setting resource-specific targets and evaluating specific resource policies.

Effective implementation of resource policies requires consistent and robust indicators. An increasing number of national and international strategies focussing on resource efficiency as a means for reaching a “green economy” call for such indicators. As supply chains of goods and services are increasingly organised on the global level, comprehensive indicators taking into account upstream material flows associated with internationally traded products need to be compiled. Particularly in the last few years, the development of consumption-based indicators of material use – also termed “material footprints” – has made considerable progress. This paper presents a comprehensive review of existing methodologies to calculate material footprint-type indicators. The three prevailing approaches, i.e. environmentally extended input–output analysis (EE-IOA), coefficient approaches based on process analysis data, and hybrid approaches combing elements of EE-IOA and process analysis are presented, existing models using the different approaches discussed, and advantages and disadvantages of each approach identified. We argue that there is still a strong need for improvement of the specific approaches as well as comparability of results, in order to reduce uncertainties. The paper concludes with recommendations for further development covering methodological, data and institutional aspects.

Production and consumption activities in industrialized countries are increasingly dependent on material and energy resources from other world regions and imply significant economic and environmental consequences in other regions around the world. The substitution of domestic material extraction and processing through imports is also shifting environmental burden abroad and thus extends the responsibility for environmental impacts as well as social consequences from the national to the global level. Based on the results of the Global Resource Accounting Model, this paper presents the first trade balances and consumption indicators for embodied materials in a time series from 1995 to 2005. The model includes 53 countries and two world regions. It is based on the 2009 edition of the input–output tables and bilateral trade data published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and is extended by physical data on global material extraction. The results quantify the global shift of embodied material resources from developing and emerging countries to the industrialized world. In addition to the level of industrialization and wealth, population density is identified as an important factor for the formation of physical trade patterns. Exports of embodied materials of less densely populated countries tend to surpass their imports, and vice versa. We also provide a quantitative comparison between conventionally applied indicators on material consumption based on direct material flows and indicators including embodied material flows. We show that the difference between those two indicators can be as much as 200%, calling for an adjustment of conventional national material flow indicators. Multi-regional input–output models prove to be a useful methodological approach to derive globally consistent and comprehensive data on material embodiments of trade and consumption.

Summary Production in emerging economies, such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Argentina (BRICSA), increased substantially over the past two decades. This is, on the one hand, due to growing domestic demand within these countries, and, on the other hand, due to a deepened international division of work. Global trade linkages have become denser and production chains are no longer restricted to only one or two countries. The volume of international trade in intermediate inputs as well as final consumption goods has tripled in the past two decades. With this, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and materials embodied in traded goods have increased, making it increasingly difficult to identify the actual causes of emissions and material extractions, as producing and extracting countries are not necessarily consuming the resulting goods. Using the multiregional input-output Global Resource Accounting Model (GRAM), this article shows how global carbon emissions and materials requirements are allocated from producing/extracting countries to consuming countries. It thereby contributes to the rapidly growing body of literature on environmental factors embodied in international trade by bringing two key environmental categories—CO2 emissions and materials—into one consistent and global framework of analysis for the first time. The results show that part of the increase in carbon emissions and materials extraction in BRICSA is caused by increasing amounts of trade with countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development as well as a growing demand for goods and services produced within BRICSA.

In recent years, attempts have been made to develop an integrated Footprint approach for the assessment of the environmental impacts of production and consumption. In this paper, we provide for the first time a definition of the “Footprint Family” as a suite of indicators to track human pressure on the planet and under different angles. This work has been developed under the 7th Framework Programme in the European Commission (EC) funded One Planet Economy Network: Europe (OPEN:EU) project. It builds on the premise that no single indicator per se is able to comprehensively monitor human impact on the environment, but indicators rather need to be used and interpreted jointly. A description of the research question, rationale and methodology of the Ecological, Carbon and Water Footprint is first provided. Similarities and differences among the three indicators are then highlighted to show how these indicators overlap, interact, and complement each other. The paper concludes by defining the “Footprint Family” of indicators and outlining its appropriate policy use for the European Union (EU). We believe this paper can be of high interest for both policy makers and researchers in the field of ecological indicators, as it brings clarity on most of the misconceptions and misunderstanding around Footprint indicators, their accounting frameworks, messages, and range of application.

The Global Resource Accounting Model (GRAM) is an environmentally-extended multi-regional input-output model, covering 48 sectors in 53 countries and two regions. Next to CO2 emissions, GRAM also includes different resource categories. Using GRAM, we are able to estimate the amount of carbon emissions embodied in international trade for each year between 1995 and 2005. These results include all origins and destinations of emissions, so that emissions can be allocated to countries consuming the products that embody these emissions. Net-CO2 imports of OECD countries increased by 80% between 1995 and 2005. These findings become particularly relevant, as the externalisation of environmental burden through international trade might be an effective strategy for industrialised countries to maintain high environmental quality within their own borders, while externalising the negative environmental consequences of their consumption processes to other parts of the world. This paper focuses on the methodological aspects and data requirements of the model, and shows results for selected countries and aggregated regions.

Contains fulltext : 182654.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access)

Summary This contribution presents the state of the art of economywide material flow accounting. Starting from a brief recollection of the intellectual and policy history of this approach, we outline system definition, key methodological assumptions, and derived indicators. The next section makes an effort to establish data reliability and uncertainty for a number of existing multinational (European and global) material flow accounting (MFA) data compilations and discusses sources of inconsistencies and variations for some indicators and trends. The results show that the methodology has reached a certain maturity: Coefficients of variation between databases lie in the range of 10% to 20%, and correlations between databases across countries amount to an average R 2 of 0.95. After discussing some of the research frontiers for further methodological development, we conclude that the material flow accounting framework and the data generated have reached a maturity that warrants material flow indicators to complement traditional economic and demographic information in providing a sound basis for discussing national and international policies for sustainable resource use.

Many of today's most urgent environmental problems arise from increasing volumes of worldwide production and consumption and the associated use of natural resources, including renewable and non-renewable raw materials, energy, water and land. Solid indicators to measure different dimensions of anthropogenic resource use are essential for designing appropriate policy measures for a sustainable management of these resources. Based on a brief review of the current state of the art of resource use indicators, this paper suggests a new set of complementary resource use indicators, combining existing measures for resource use. The suggested indicator set covers the core resource input categories of materials, water and land area and includes the output category of greenhouse gas emissions. This set can be applied consistently from the micro level of products and companies up to the macro level of countries and world regions. All suggested indicators take a life-cycle wide perspective on production and consumption activities. This set of indicators deals with the issue of the overall scale of the human production and consumption system. It can be regarded as the general indicator framework, based on which more specific indicators, for example, on different environmental impacts related to natural resource use, can be calculated.

Summary This article aims at estimating the raw material equivalents (RMEs)—the upstream used material flows required along the production chain—of imports and exports for some Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Furthermore, the United States is included in the analysis as a reference for a high-income economy. The RME concept and the empirical evidence are articulated by use of an input−output methodology. Results are set out for the year 2003 for each of the countries and in time series for the years 1977, 1986, 1996, and 2003 in the case of Chile. The findings show not only the physical dimensions behind direct material traded but also how the previous exporter (importer) position of a country (based on standard material flow analysis indicators) deteriorates, alleviates, or changes. Implications for material consumption indicators, such as direct material consumption (DMC) and raw material consumption (RMC), are also drawn. The results suggest basing the discussion of material flows on a broader set of indicators to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the implications of international trade and its impacts on the environment.

Issues related to the unsustainable use of natural resources are currently high on the policy agenda both in Europe and in other world regions. A large number of studies assessed past developments of material use and resource productivities. However, little effort has so far been devoted to forecasting future patterns of natural resource use and to provide ex-ante assessments of environmental and economic effects of different resource policies. This paper presents results from the international research project “MOSUS” (Modelling opportunities and limits for restructuring Europe towards sustainability), which was designed to fill some of these research gaps. In this project, a global economy–energy model system was extended by a worldwide database on material inputs, in order to run three scenarios for European development up to the year 2020: a baseline scenario without additional policy intervention and two so-called “sustainability scenarios”, simulating the implementation of six packages of policy measures geared towards decoupling economic activity from material and energy throughput. These measures included, amongst others, taxes on CO2 emissions and transport, measures to increase metal recycling rates, and a consulting programme to raise material productivity of industrial production. This paper presents the evaluation of the three scenarios with regard to the extraction of natural resources on the European and global level. In the baseline scenario, used domestic extraction within the EU remains roughly constant until 2020, while unused domestic extraction decreases (particularly overburden from mining activities). The stabilisation of domestic extraction, however, is accompanied by growing imports of material intensive products. This indicates that the material requirements of the European economy will increasingly be met through imports from other world regions, causing shifts of environmental pressures related to material extraction and processing away from Europe towards resource-rich countries. The implementation of the six sustainability policy measures applied in the sustainability scenarios results in a slight absolute reduction of domestic extraction in all European countries and significantly increased resource productivities. The results suggest that policy instruments aimed at raising eco-efficiency on the micro level can be conducive to economic growth. To limit rebound effects on the macro level, these instruments must, however, be accompanied by other policies influencing the prices of energy and materials. With regard to global resource use trends, the baseline scenario forecasts a significant growth of resource extraction, particularly in developing countries, reflecting the growing demand for natural resources of emerging economies such as China and India.

There are many opportunities for consumers to design their lives more sustainably. While a rapidly growing body of literature has investigated how consumers can reduce carbon footprints in key con- sumption areas, such as food, housing and mobility, an overall framework that allows structuring those options across all consumption areas is still missing. Hence, this paper presents a novel and systematic framework to identify improvement options that promote climate change mitigation and structure them based on their primary mode of impact on GHG emissions. The framework targets consumer practices and focuses on ambitious, but technically and socioeconomically feasible strategies for consumers to lower their carbon footprint. Four major categories for reducing consumption-based emissions form the basic framework, which are then subdivided into behavioural strategies and sub-strategies. The practical application of the framework is illustrated by using food consumption as an example. Systematically identifying improvement options can advance a holistic understanding of the range of behavioural strategies targeting consumer choices that operate at different stages in the supply chain. It thus provides a starting point for addressing critical questions related to the role of consumers in supporting climate change mitigation. (authors' abstract)

In this article we develop a comprehensive conceptual framework for resource efficiency indicators with a consistent link of resource use to the socio-economic system and activities therein as well as to the natural system and its ecosystem functioning. Three broad groups of indicators are defined: (1) resource use indicators representing pressures on the environment; (2) resource efficiency indicators relating resource use indicators to the socio-economic side; and (3) environmental impact indicators linking resource use impacts on the state of the natural system. Based on this conceptual framework we develop a structure for possible resource efficiency indicators and conduct a RACER evaluation on the Relevance, Acceptance, Credibility, Easiness and Robustness of indicators. With the RACER evaluation, we identify areas where indicators are well established and available as well as areas where indicators still need further development or even need to be designed first. © 2016 by the authors.

In the context of the transformation toward a "green economy," issues related to natural resource use have rapidly increased in importance in European and international policy debates. The large number of studies applying economy-wide material flow analysis so far mostly produced aggregated national indicators, making the results difficult to connect to policies, which are often designed for single sectors or consumption areas. This paper provides a detailed assessment of the composition of EU's material footprint in its global context, aiming at identifying the main product groups contributing to overall material consumption and specifying the geographical sources for the raw materials required to satisfy EU's final demand. Based on multi-regional input¿output (MRIO) modeling, we apply production layer decomposition to assess supply chains and their structural changes from 1995 to 2011. The global MRIO database used in this study is EXIOBASE 3, which disaggregates 200 products and 163 industries, of which 33 represent material extraction sectors. By that means, we increase the level of detail to a degree where policies can more easily connect to. We find that the generally growing material footprint of the EU was characterized by a dramatic shift regarding the origin of raw materials, with the share of materials extracted within the EU territory falling from 68 % in 1995 to 35 % in 2011. In 2011, raw materials extracted in China to produce exports to the EU already contributed an equal share to EU's material footprint as material extraction within the EU itself. Import dependency is most critical for the material group of metal ores, with only 13 % of all metals required as inputs to EU final demand stemming from within the EU. Regarding product composition, construction was confirmed as the most important sector contributing to the material footprint, followed by the group of manufacturing products based on biomass. Materials embodied in service sector activities together contributed a quarter to the total material footprint in 2011, making services an important, but currently disregarded area for European resource policies. We also find that supply chain structures became more complex over time, with a growing part located outside the EU territory. (authors' abstract)

Material flow accounting and analysis (MFA) has been established as an influential framework for quantifying the use of natural resources by modern societies. So far, however, no reference data for overall scale and trends of global extraction of natural resources and their distribution between different world regions has been available. This paper presents the first comprehensive quantification of the material basis of the global economy, i.e. used domestic extraction in a time series from 1980 to 2002. We analyse time trends for major material groups (fossil fuels, metals, industrial and construction minerals, and biomass) disaggregated into seven world regions. This allows for (a) an illustration of the global economy's physical growth driven by worldwide processes of economic integration over the past decades, and (b) an indication of the worldwide distribution of environmental pressures associated with material extraction. The results show that annual resource consumption of the world economy increased by about one third between 1980 and 2002. This indicates that scale effects due to economic growth more than compensated for other effects, such as the relative increase of the service sectors' contribution to GDP (structural effect) and the use of new production technologies with higher material and energy efficiency (technology effect). The observed growth of natural resource extraction is unevenly distributed over the main material categories, with metals showing the highest growth rate. The regional analysis shows the increasing importance of Asia and Latin America in global resource extraction. On the global level, material intensity, i.e. resource extraction per unit of GDP, decreased by about 25%, indicating relative decoupling of resource extraction from economic growth. The paper concludes with policy recommendations for a more sustainable use of natural resources.

When an environmental problem involves several agents, different environmental indicators can be chosen. In this paper we derive axiomatically an indicator of “environmental responsibility”, the quantitative contribution of each agent to the environmental problem. This indicator must possess properties that most agents are likely to accept. Apart from a normalization condition, that indicator must be: (1) additive, implying that the responsibility of a set of agents is the sum of the responsibilities of each agent; (2) account for indirect effects under economic causality, implying that the agent that benefits economically from an environmental damage is responsible for it; (3) monotonic in direct environmental pressure, implying that the responsibility of a given agent cannot decrease if its actions lead to an overall worsening of the environmental problem; (4) symmetric in production and consumption, meaning that if the contribution of an agent's consumption and production behavior is interchanged, that agent's responsibility cannot change. We prove that an indicator fulfilling these properties exists and is unique, given by the average of the environmental pressure generated to produce the primary inputs and the final demand of an agent. The existence of a unique indicator of environmental responsibility can facilitate cooperation in environmental agreements and raise commitment in the implementation of environmental policies.

Materials flow analysis (MFA) is internationally recognized as a key tool to assess the biophysical metabolism of societies and to provide aggregated indicators for environmental pressures of human activities. Economy-wide MFAs have been compiled for a number of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, but so far very few studies exist for countries in the South. In this article, the first materials-flow-based indicators for Chile are presented. The article analyzes the restructuring of the Chilean economy toward an active integration in the world markets from the perspective of natural resource use in a time series from 1973 to 2000. Special emphasis is placed on the assessment of materials flows related to Chile's international trade relations. Results show that material inputs to the Chilean economy increased by a factor of 6, mainly as a result of the promotion of resource-intensive exports from the mining, fruit growing, forestry, and fishery sectors. At more than 40 tons, Chile's resource use per capita at present is one of the highest in the world. The article addresses the main shortcomings of the MFA approach, such as weightbased aggregation and the missing links between environmental pressures and impacts, and gives suggestions for methodological improvements and possible extensions of the MFA framework, with the intent of developing MFA into a more powerful tool for policy use.

In the last few years, a number of studies have been presented that link material flow accounting and input–output analysis (based on monetary input–output tables) for the calculation of direct and indirect resource inputs for production and consumption activities. The compilation of the first physical input–output tables for some European countries in the 1990s opened new possibilities for linking physical accounting and input– output analysis. Physical input–output analysis has so far only been applied for selected materials, but it has not been used for comprehensive assessments of material requirements of economic activities. In this paper, possibilities and limits of this new input–output approach are clarified. We present and discuss a procedure similar to monetary input– output analysis and develop an alternative approach to account for primary inputs and waste otherwise not included in the analysis. Based on aggregated input–output tables for Germany, we present numerical examples intended to comp...