Embodied Resource Flows in a Global Economy

This article presents a methodology for identifying critical links in global resource supply chains by tracking resources from their extraction in one region of the world economy through their embodiment in intermediate products in the same and other regions to eventual embodiment in final goods. We build on previous work that applied an absorbing Markov chain (AMC) to results obtained using an input‐output (IO) model of a single region to define a resource‐specific network within that economy. In the absence of model calculations, the AMC can also be applied to standard IO data for a past year. This article first generalizes the analytic framework from a single region to the important case of the global resource‐specific network. This network typically includes cycling of embodied resources between sectors not only within each economy, but also among regions, as subsequent rounds of intermediate products are traded. Next, we refine that analysis to exhibit a crucial subnetwork, the resource end‐use network, which only tracks the portion of the resource that ends up embodied in a specific final product in a given region. Finally, we develop techniques to distinguish key branches of these networks and provide detailed insights about the structure of global resource dependence. A numerical example is applied to results of scenario analysis using an IO model of the world economy. Two alternative scenarios are compared. In each scenario, embodied resources are carried over specific branches of a global network in three regions using three resources to produce four goods.     

Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity: Forty Years of Evidence

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.     

Regional material flow accounts for China: Examining China's natural resource use at the provincial and national level

Over the last three decades, China has experienced the most dynamic economic development lifting living standards and resulting in fast‐growing use of natural resources. In the past, the focus has been on national MFA accounts which do not do justice to the second largest economy, home to 19% of the world population and having 30% of global material use. In this research, we calculate material extraction for China at the regional level during 1995–2015 using the most recent available statistical data and applying the most up‐to‐date international calculation methods. In particular, we combine a bottom‐up and top‐down approach for constructing the dataset of China's economically used Domestic Extraction (DEU) in an integrated way. This approach also improves the Chinese national material flow accounts and allows us to present a reliable database of DE of materials for China to date. Our new dataset provides the basis for calculating material footprints and environmental impacts of China's regions. The dataset enables us to evaluate regional resource efficiency trends in China. We find that during the past two decades, China's material use has grown strongly from 11.7 billion tonnes in 1995 to 35.4 billion tonnes in 2015. Material use has accelerated between 2000 and 2010 but slowed down between 2010 and 2015 reflecting the economic contraction caused by the Global Financial Crisis which reduced the global demand for China's manufacturing and a reorientation of China's economic policy settings toward quality of growth. Unsurprisingly, different regions play different roles in the supply chain of materials, achieving different economic performances resulting in very diverse material efficiency outcomes. This information is important to allow for a targeted policy approach to increase resource efficiency, reduce environmental impacts of resource use, and grow wellbeing in China with large positive implications for global sustainability. This study provides the basis for the development of relevant resource management policies for different regions in the future.     

The Multilevel Cycle of Anthropogenic Zinc

A comprehensive annual cycle for stocks and flows of zinc, based on data from circa 1994 and incorporating information on extraction, processing, fabrication, use, discard, recycling, and landfilling, was carried out at three discrete governmental unit levels—54 countries and 1 country group (which together comprise essentially all global anthropogenic zinc stocks and flows), nine world regions, and the planet as a whole. All of these cycles are available in an electronic supplement to this article, which thus provides a metadata set on zinc flows for the use of industrial ecology researchers. A "best estimate" global zinc cycle was constructed to resolve aggregation discrepancies. Among the most interesting results are the following: (1) The accumulation ratio, that is, addition to in-use stock as a function of zinc entering use, is positive and large (2/3 of zinc entering use is added to stock) (country, regional, and global levels); (2) secondary input ratios (fractions of input to fabrication that are from recycled zinc) and domestic recycling percentages (fractions of discarded zinc that are recycled) differ among regions by as much as a factor of six (regional level); (3) worldwide, about 40% of the zinc that was discarded in various forms was recovered and reused or recycled (global level); (4) zinc cycles can usefully be characterized by a set of ratios, including, notably, the utilization efficiency (the ratio of manufacturing waste to manufacturing output: 0.090) and the prompt scrap ratio (new scrap as a fraction of manufacturing input: 0.070) (global level). Because capturable discards are a significant fraction of primary zinc inputs, if a larger proportion of discards were recaptured, extraction requirements would decrease significantly (global level). The results provide a framework for complementary studies in resource stocks, industrial resource utilization, energy consumption, waste management, industrial economics, and environmental impacts.     

The Physical Economy of the United States of America

The United States is not only the world's largest economy, but it is also one of the world's largest consumers of natural resources. The country, which is inhabited by some 5% of the world's population, uses roughly one‐fifth of the global primary energy supply and 15% of all extracted materials. This article explores long‐term trends and patterns of material use in the United States. Based on a material flow account (MFA) that is fully consistent with current standards of economy‐wide MFAs and covers domestic extraction, imports, and exports of materials for a 135‐year period, we investigated the evolution of the U.S. industrial metabolism. This process was characterized by an 18‐fold increase in material consumption, a multiplication of material use per capita, and a shift from renewable biomass toward mineral and fossil resources. In spite of considerable improvements in material intensity, no dematerialization has happened so far; in contrast to other high‐income countries, material use has not stabilized since the 1970s, but has continued to grow. This article compares patterns and trends of material use in the United States with those in Japan and the United Kingdom and discusses the factors underlying the disproportionately high level of U.S. per capita resource consumption.     

Industrial Symbiosis in the Australian Minerals Industry: The Cases of Kwinana and Gladstone

The realization of regional synergies in industrial areas with intensive minerals processing provides a significant avenue toward sustainable resource processing. This article provides an overview of past and current synergy developments in two of Australia's major heavy industrial regions, Kwinana (Western Australia) and Gladstone (Queensland), and includes a comparative review and assessment of the drivers, barriers, and trigger events for regional synergies initiatives in both areas. Kwinana and Gladstone compare favorably with well‐known international examples in terms of the current level and maturity of industry involvement and collaboration and the commitment to further explore regional resource synergies. Kwinana stands out with regard to the number, diversity, complexity, and maturity of existing synergies. Gladstone is remarkable with regard to unusually large geographic boundaries and high dominance of one industry sector. Many diverse regional synergy opportunities still appear to exist in both industrial regions (particularly in Kwinana), mostly in three broad areas: water, energy, and inorganic by‐product reuse. To enhance the further development of new regional synergies, the Centre for Sustainable Resource Processing (CSRP), a joint initiative of Australian minerals processing companies, research providers, and government agencies, has undertaken several collaborative projects. These include research to facilitate the process of identifying and evaluating potential synergy opportunities and assistance for the industries with feasibility studies and implementation of selected synergy projects in both regions. The article also reports on the progress to date from this CSRP research.     

Global biomass potentials under sustainability restrictions defined by the European Renewable Energy Directive 2009/28/EC

The political will to reduce global GHG emissions has largely contributed to increased global biofuel production and trade. The expanding cultivation of energy crops may drive changes in the terrestrial ecosystems such as land cover and biodiversity loss. When biomass replaces fossil energy carriers, sustainability criteria are therefore crucial to avoid adverse impacts and ensure a net positive GHG balance. The European Union has set mandatory sustainability criteria for liquid biofuels in its Renewable Energy Directive (RED) 2009/28/EC to ensure net positive impacts of its biofuel policy. The adoption of sustainability criteria in other world regions and their extension to solid and gaseous biomass in the EU is ongoing. This paper examines the effect of the EU RED sustainability criteria on the availability of biomass resources at global and regional scale. It quantifies the relevance of sustainability criteria in biomass resource assessments taking into account the criteria's spatial distribution. This assessment does not include agricultural and forestry residues and aquatic biomass. Previously unknown interrelations between sustainability criteria are examined and described for ten world regions. The analysis concludes that roughly 10% (98.5 EJ) of the total theoretical potential of 977.2 EJ occurs in areas free of sustainability concerns.     

Metabolic Profile of the Colombian Economy from 1970 to 2007

This article characterizes the societal metabolism of the Colombian economy, identifying the main factors of natural resources use, overuse, or exhaustion. The environmental sustainability of a country depends to a large extent on the size of the economy compared to the available resource base. Material flow indicators provide an assessment of size or scale of economies. Direct material flow indicators are used to analyze the ecological dimension of economic activity in the period 1970–2007. Some resource extraction conflicts are briefly described in the light of material flow analysis. Foreign and domestic demand promotes increasing extraction and export of domestic natural resources. This is sometimes related to an irreversible deterioration of the local environment. The concept of “ecologically unequal exchange” with the rest of the world is analyzed in this context. Colombia has a large and growing negative physical trade balance, whereas per capita use of materials is still about half of the industrial countries’ average.     

African Urbanization: Assimilating Urban Metabolism into Sustainability Discourse and Practice

Shaping sustainable, equitable African cities requires strengthened investigations into the cities’ current resource flows, infrastructure systems, and future resource requirements. The field of urban metabolism (UM) offers multiple forms of analysis with which to map, analyse, and visualize urban resource profiles. Challenges in assessing UM in African cities include data scarcity at the city level, difficulty in tracking informal flows, lack of standardized methods, and the open nature of cities. However, such analyses are needed at the local level, given that city practitioners cannot rely purely on urban planning traditions of the global North or the typically broad studies about urban Africa, for supporting strategies toward sustainable urban development. This article aims to draw together the concepts of sustainable development and UM and explore their application in the African context. Further, the article estimated resource profiles for 120 African cities, including consumption of biomass, fossil fuels, electricity, construction materials, and water, as well as emissions of carbon dioxide. These resource profiles serve as a baseline from which to begin assessing the current and future resource intensity of these cities. It also provides insights into the cities’ relative resource impact, future consumption trends, and potential options for sustainability interventions.     

资源生态化利用中的生物加工过程

自然的生态系统目前正受到现代生产方式的严重挑战,其结果造成能源短缺,资源匮乏,环境污染等问题,对人类生存构成危机。人类需要一种遵循地球生态系统规律的,自然与社会环境协调发展的生态化超现代化生产方式。其核心技术是资源生态化利用。对资源生态化系统中宏观的、介观的和微观的化学和生化过程问题进行初步探讨：宏观尺度上的生态平衡、物质与能量的循环转化,介观尺度上物种进化、繁殖与死亡,生物食物铁的形成,微观尺度上生物体内代谢过程中的物质转化与传递等。资源利用生态化的基础是生物加工过程,因此实现资源生态化利用不仅要效法自然的生态系统,还要注重现代工程技术、现代生物技术在生态化系统应用中理论和技术的创新。合理利用生物加工过程可以解决人类面临的资源、能源、环境与健康等重大问题,并实现可持续发展。     

Exploring the Global Journey of Nickel with Markov Chain Models

Markov chain (MC) modeling is a versatile tool in policy analysis and has been applied in several forms to analyze resource flows. This article builds on previous discussions of the relationship among absorbing Markov chains (AMCs), material flow analysis (MFA), and input‐output (IO) analysis, and presents a full‐scale application of MC modeling for a particular globally relevant, nonrenewable resource, namely nickel. The MC model presented here is built on comprehensive, recently compiled nickel flow data for 52 geographic regions. Considering all possible cycles of recycling and reuse, nickel extracted in 2005 is estimated to have a technological lifetime of 73 ± 7 years. During its global journey, nickel enters use, for some application somewhere in the world, an average of three times, the largest share of which occurs in China. Nickel entering fabrication in 2005 is estimated to enter use approximately four times. Over time, nickel is lost to the environment and as a tramp element in carbon steel; the final distribution of nickel among these absorbing states is 78% and 22%, respectively. Of all the nickel in ore extracted in 2005, fully 28% will eventually end up in the tailings, slag, and landfills of China. MC results are also combined with geographically specific life cycle inventory data to determine the overall energy invested in nickel during its many cycles of use. MCs provide a powerful tool for tracking resources through the network of global production, use, and waste management, and opportunities for further integration with other modeling efforts are also discussed.     

Designing the Ocean Policy Future: An Essay on How I Am Going To Do That

A new millennium offers an opportunity to think about possible future directions in ocean policy. But such an effort must take account of the considerable changes in the world political and economic system since 1989 - globalization with its rapid transportation, communication, economic interdependence; population increase, increased pressure on the stock of the world's natural resources and spaces, the end of the Cold War but with diffusion of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and a rise in world environmental consciousness. In this context we must develop patterns of sustainable use, and learn how to implement forward look principles for ocean management such as those propounded by the Luso-American Foundation. However, we have not calculated the political and economic costs or understood how we will achieve outcomes consistent with the principles. These are critical to successful global ocean governance. We understand what must be achieved but not by whom or how.     

Embodied Resource Flows and Product Flows

We develop the absorbing Markov chain (AMC) for describing in detail the network of paths through an industrial system taken by an embodied resource from extraction through intermediate products and, finally, consumer products. We refer to this as a resource‐specific network. This work builds on a recent literature in industrial ecology that uses an AMC to quantify the number of times a resource passes through a recycling sector before ending up in a landfill. Our objective is to incorporate into that analysis an input‐output (IO) table so that the resource paths explicitly take account of the interdependence of sectors through their reliance on intermediate products. This feature makes it possible to track multiple resources simultaneously and consistently and to represent both resources and products in mixed units. Hypothetical scenarios about technological changes and changes in consumer demand are analyzed with an IO model, and model solutions generate the AMC database. A numerical example is provided. We identify the three most critical enhancements to the standard IO model that will be needed for analyzing material cycles: the incorporation of waste‐processing sectors, stock and flow relationships, and international trade. The idea is to implement an AMC after each modeling step for analyses, such as tracking a resource extracted in one region to landfills in other regions and evaluating ways to intensify secondary recovery at key junctures in between.     

基于自组织特征映射模型(SOFM)网络的中国自然资源生态安全区划

自然资源生态安全是国家安全的重要组成部分,自然资源生态安全区划对保障区域可持续发展提供了重要途径。基于自然资源数据、生态环境数据和相关区划资料,从生态敏感性与生态服务重要性角度构建了自然资源生态安全评价指标体系,进而揭示了中国自然资源生态安全的空间格局;通过建立区划的原则和指标,按照一级区主要反映自然资源空间分布格局,二级区主要揭示自然资源生态安全水平的差异,采用SOFM网络制订了中国自然资源生态安全区划方案。结果显示：(1)中国自然资源生态安全水平整体偏低,以中警与重警状态区域为主,安全和较安全状态的区域仅占24.22%,其中低安全等级区多分布于400mm等降水量线以西的干旱、半干旱区,高安全等级区则集中分布于水热资源与生物资源较为丰富的东南部地区;(2)中国自然资源生态安全区划方案包括8个一级区与27个二级区,总结归纳各大区自然资源的特征和威胁生态安全的问题,并针对二级区自然资源生态安全状况提出了对策建议。研究结果可为分区、分类推进全国自然资源可持续利用和国土空间优化提供理论支持与决策依据。     

Sustainable harvesting of wild seaweed resources

Abstract

Macroalgae have played an important role in coastal communities for centuries. In the past, they have been harvested and gathered from shorelines around the world for traditional uses such as food, animal feed and a crude fertilizer (marine manure). Today, seaweeds are used in a multitude of applications with expanding global industries based on hydrocolloids, cosmetics and food supplements, and also as a potential biofuel source. However, of the approximately 10?000 algal species reported to exist, only a small number are commercially utilized. While representing only a small fraction of total global seaweed production, harvesting and gathering ‘wild’ seaweeds has had, and continues to have, an integral role in many coastal societies, often being intrinsically linked to the cultural identity of those coastal communities. Today, 32 countries actively harvest seaweeds from wild stocks, with over 800?000 t harvested annually from natural beds. It is vitally important that seaweeds are utilized sustainably and that natural resources are effectively managed by coastal communities with vested interests around the world. As the popularity of seaweeds increases and the use of less traditional species with novel applications comes to the fore, it is critically important to make certain that the sustainability of the resource is ensured given the increased pressures of harvesting. Issues exist regarding ownership of the resource and its over-exploitation, and the implementation of environmentally damaging harvesting techniques must be avoided. Resource scientists, managers, conservationists, governments, and other stakeholders need to be proactive in the sustainable management of these vulnerable, yet valuable, resources.     

Renewable Eco‐industrial Development

This article reviews the scope of the discipline of industrial ecology and, in the context of an urgent requirement for substantial and rapid change in the face of global sustainability challenges, argues that the discipline could embrace a more proactive, interventionist stance in the form of renewable eco‐industrial development. Existing eco‐industrialism is presented as flawed, with many cases premised on the use of nonrenewable resources. Renewable eco‐industrial development, while still nascent, has the potential both to resolve some sustainability challenges and to offer a new area of endeavor for industrial ecology, albeit one with its own unique difficulties, such as conflict with food production. Renewable eco‐industrial development is further argued to bring industrial ecology into a more socially critical stance as it concerns the future allocation of scarce resources.     

Closing the TIMES Integrated Assessment Model (TIAM‐FR) Raw Materials Gap with Life Cycle Inventories

Integrated assessment models are in general not constrained by mineral resource supply. In this paper, we introduce a material accounting method as a first step toward addressing the raw materials gap in the TIMES integrated assessment model (TIAM‐FR version). The method consists of attributing process‐based life cycle inventories (LCIs) taken from the ecoinvent 3.3 database to the TIAM‐FR technology processes constituting the global energy system. We demonstrate the method performing a prospective exercise on the electricity‐generating sector in a second shared socioeconomic pathway (SSP2) baseline scenario on the 2010–2100 time horizon. We start by disaggregating the LCIs into three separate life phases (construction, operation, and decommissioning) and coupling them to their respective TIAM‐FR electric outputs (new capacities, electricity production, and end‐of‐life capacities) in order to estimate the annual mineral resource requirements. Prospective uses of fossil fuels and metallic and nonmetallic mineral resources are quantified dynamically at the life phase and regional levels (15 world regions). The construction of hydropower, solar power, and wind power plants generate increasing use of metallic and nonmetallic mineral resources in successive peak and valley periods. However, the use of fossil fuels is much higher than the use of mineral resources all along the horizon. Finally, we evaluate how sensitive the global material use is to the allocation of a share of infrastructure activities to the decommissioning phase. This approach could be extended to other integrated assessment models and possibly other energy sectors.     

Metagenomics and industrial applications

Different industries have different motivations to probe the enormous resource that is uncultivated microbial diversity. Currently, there is a global political drive to promote white (industrial) biotechnology as a central feature of the sustainable economic future of modern industrialized societies. This requires the development of novel enzymes, processes, products and applications. Metagenomics promises to provide new molecules with diverse functions, but ultimately, expression systems are required for any new enzymes and bioactive molecules to become an economic success. This review highlights industrial efforts and achievements in metagenomics.     

Promoting Industrial Symbiosis: Using the Concept of Proximity to Explore Social Network Development

Industrial symbiosis (IS) has been identified as a strategy for promoting industrial sustainability. IS has been defined as the development of close working agreements between industrial and other organizations that, through the innovative reuse, recycling, or sharing of resources, leads to resource efficiency. Key to IS are innovation and social network development. This article critically reviews IS literature and concludes that, to inform proactive strategies for promoting IS, the understanding of the social processes leading to resource innovation needs to be improved. Industrial ecologists generally believe that close geographical proximity and trust are essential to the development of IS. This article argues, however, that there is a need to learn more about the meaning of, need for, and specific role of geographical proximity and trust in IS and, additionally, that other potentially important social factors have remained underexplored. To move IS research forward, this article suggests to engage with research in economic geography on the concept of ‘proximity,’ which draws attention to the ways in which geographical, cognitive, institutional, social, and organizational distances between actors might affect innovation. Arguably, the analytically distinct, but flexible, dimensions of proximity can be useful to explore how and why IS develops. The resulting qualitative knowledge would form a basis for researching whether general patterns for IS development exist and, more important, could inform public and private strategies that indicate which actions could be taken, as well as when and in what way to promote resource synergies and sustainable industrial development.     

Nomadization in Rajasthan, India: Migration, Institutions, and Economy

Despite a global trend toward settlement, the incidence of pastoral nomadism is on the rise in the Marwar region of Rajasthan, India. Typical explanations for this change use models of population pressure; increasing herds and decreasing pasture are held to blame. This explanation, however intuitive, is unsatisfactory. Instead, changing institutional and economic patterns are creating new contexts for strategic movement. Bottlenecks in the yearly resource calendar, caused by the disintegration of obligatory social relationships, force migrations during periods of scarcity. Changes in the volume and pattern of the meat and wool markets have also created opportunities for migrating pastoralists. Producers increase their access to markets and the reproductive rate of their herd through long, annual, migration. While nomadism is a general adaptation to changes in the socioeconomic conditions of the region, differential resource endowments account for the range of strategies; wealthy herders have opportunities not enjoyed by more marginal producers.