Material Flow Accounting: Measuring Global Material Use for Sustainable Development

By F. Krausmann, H. Schandl, N. Eisenmenger, S. Giljum, Tim Jackson. 2017

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The growing extraction of natural resources and the waste and emissions resulting from their use are directly or indirectly responsible for humanity approaching or even surpassing critical planetary boundaries. A sound knowledge base of society's metabolism, i.e., the physical exchange processes between society and its natural environment and the production and consumption processes involved, is essential to develop strategies for more sustainable resource use. Economy-wide material flow accounting (MFA) is a framework that provides consistent compilations of the material inputs to national economies, changes in material stocks within the economic system, and material outputs to other economies and the environment. We present the conceptual foundations of MFA and derived indicators and review the current state of knowledge of global patterns and trends of extraction, trade, and use of materials. We discuss the relation of material use and economic development and the decoupling of material use from econom...

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/39f97590680f08fa9e28402e8ecefc493c81e898

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

1. H. Haberl
2. F. Krausmann
3. Dominik Wiedenhofer
4. Felix Creutzig
5. Andreas Mayer
6. Daniel Hausknost
7. A. Schaffartzik
8. T. Fishman

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. H. Haberl
2. Andreas Mayer
3. F. Krausmann
4. J. Minx
5. Piero Morseletto

In Mechanical Engineering

1. Dominik Wiedenhofer
2. Sabine Fuss
3. J. Minx
4. M. Callaghan
5. W. Lamb
6. Pete Smith
7. F. Krausmann

Citations in the corpus

• A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, methodology): “Current stagnation in per capita territorial/production-based resource use (Fishman et al 2016, Bleischwitz et al 2018a), for example, depends on past material flows (Mayer et al 2017) and entail a substantial legacy for the future (Krausmann et al 2017c).”
• Negative emissions—Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects (2018, background): “…scenario of tropical soil in the introduction of this section (8 Gt rock/year) is comparable to the amount of coal mining and transport (IEA 2017) and appears to be low if compared to the 2010’s global material consumption (biomass, fossils, and minerals) of 70 Gt per year (Krausmann et al 2017).”
• A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part I: bibliometric and conceptual mapping (2020, methodology): “…studies: biomass used as food and feed (Haberl 2001), timber and other biomassbased products, non-metallic minerals and metals used to expand andmaintain material stocks of infrastructure, buildings and machinery, as well as shortlived products (e.g. road salt or fertilizer) (Krausmann et al 2017).”