MOSUS

Modelling opportunities and limits for restructuring Europe towards sustainability

MOSUS developed and applied a global environmental-economic model to quantify the interrelations between socio-economic driving forces and the state of the environment. This model was then used to simulate different scenarios towards sustainable development in Europe.

Main objective of the MOSUS project

MOSUS formulates EU development scenarios and evaluates the economic, environmental and social impacts of key environmental policy measures in order to present quantified policy recommendations for responding to global environmental challenges and changes.

The 4 key targets of MOSUS are:

1. Assessing and quantifying the European use of resources, including indirect effects induced by international trade.

2. Formulating and evaluating sustainability scenarios, linking economic performance with resource use and environmental deterioration.

3. Refine environmental indicators to assess resource productivities, material and energy intensities and labour intensities of resource use for the EU.

4. Elaborating policy strategies and actions that reconcile long-term economic development, international trade and environmental protection.

The model

The model used in MOSUS is the first such tool to directly integrate comprehensive biophysical data (material use, energy use and CO2 emissions) in a multi-country, multi-sectoral macroeconomic framework, including trade flows within Europe and between Europe and all other world regions. The model is used to perform simulations to the year 2020, putting them in relation to indicators of social and economic development.

Key results

Together with three other partners, SERI developed the first global database for material inputs on the national level. The data base covers 188 countries in a time series of 1980 to 2002 and is organised according to the methodological requirements set by the EUROSTAT handbook on economy-wide material flow accounting. The MOSUS MFA data base can be downloaded in aggregated form from www.materialflows.net.

The mix of environmental policy measures simulated in the different sustainability scenarios shows that the implementation of policies primarily geared towards decoupling economic activity from material and energy throughput can actually be conducive to economic growth. These results thus are contrary to the popular assumption that such policies will mainly raise costs for enterprises, decrease competitiveness and thus have an opportunity cost in terms of foregone output. The scenario results support the view that increasing resource and energy productivity can actually improve the position of European industries on world markets and thus also lead to the creation of new jobs. From this perspective, environmental policy becomes one of the key strategies to reach the goals of the Lisbon Strategy.

www.mosus.net

Project website