Material
flows and land use
Accounting, Analysis and Scenario Formulation
Many scientists
today recognize that the scale of the economy is a central determining
factor for ecological sustainability of economic activities. Scale is
a shorthand for the aggregate matter-energy-throughput of the industrial
metabolism.
While the quality of material flows (meant to include energy carriers)
plays a decisive role for the ecological resilience of concrete eco-systems,
their quanity can be regarded as a very rough but directionally safe
indicator of anthropogenic interventions into nature, which should be
reduced: this is how dematerialisation can be defined. By including
"ecological rucksacks" or "hidden flows", material
input is the total material and energy flow and includes not only the
materials converted within the economy but also those "left aside".
Adding the dimension of appropriated land area to material flows enables
a comprehensive accounting of natural resource inputs into socio-economic
systems.
The intended research strategy within this research area is to link data of resource inputs to input-output-type models in order to
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account and analyse for the economic sectors and regions by which these material flows and appropriated land areas are activated
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formulate and evaluate scenarios of changes towards dematerialisation on the path toward sustainable development.
These analyses will be undertaken on all levels of economic activities, comprising the local, regional, national, EU-wide and global level.
The research
activities are carried out in co-operation with IIASA
(International Institute fpr Applied System Analysis), Laxenburg, Austria.
Other research institutions are invited to join this co-operation.
Planned Activities
Data collection
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Data collection of world-wide material inputs
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Data collection of world-wide appropriated land areas
Regional level
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Indicators and scenarios for regions world-wide
EU-level
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Submission of a project proposal to the 3rd Call in the Environment and Sustainable Development Program
Global level
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Former project "Global material flows": integration of global physical data in the COMPASS model (B. Meyer/GWS and University of Osnabrück)
Workshops
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International workshop on the interrelations of monetary and bio-physical flows
Contact persons at SERI
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