Possible target corridor for sustainable use of global material resources

By S. Bringezu. 2015

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many countries have started to develop policy programs for the sustainable use of natural resources. Indicators and targets can cover both a territorial and a life-cycle-wide global perspective. This article focuses on how a safe operating space for global material resource use can be outlined based on existing economy-wide material flow indicators. It reflects on issues such as scale and systems perspective, as the choice of indicators determines the target "valves" of the socio-industrial metabolism. It considers environmental pressures and social aspects of safe and fair resource use. Existing proposals for resource consumption targets are reviewed, partially revisited, and taken as a basis to outline potential target values for a safe operating space for the extraction and use of minerals and biomass by final consumption. A potential sustainability corridor is derived with the Total Material Consumption of abiotic resources ranging from 6 to 12 t/person, the Total Material Consumption of biotic resources not exceeding 2 t/person, and the Raw Material Consumption of used biotic and abiotic materials ranging from 3 to 6 t/person until 2050. For policy, a "10-2-5 target triplet" can provide orientation, when the three indicators are assigned values of 10, 2, and 5 t/person, respectively.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/545f55f455bb3f29a4df9d0b8916e363ae8b4807

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In Environmental Engineering

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Is Green Growth Possible? (2019, unknown): “, 2012, Hoekstra and Wiedmann 2014, UNEP 2014, Bringezu 2015). Bringezu (2015) goes further and suggests that this reduction needs to happen by 2050.”
Transition Towards a Resource Efficient Circular Economy in Europe: Policy Lessons From the EU and the Member States (2017, background): “Wuppertal Institut | 9 stressed by relevant authors concerning the necessary level of material consumption in 2050 (i.e. a reduction of resource use of up to minus 80% of the current level), the EU progress appears rather slow (Ekins et al., 2009; Dittrich et al., 2012; Bringezu, 2015).”
Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity: Forty Years of Evidence (2018, background): “In many cases, it is possible to establish global limits for environmental pressures and impacts, such as, for example, the amount of additional GHG emissions that would keep the global climate below 2°C of warming (Bringezu 2015; Fang et al. 2015).”
The contradiction of the sustainable development goals: Growth versus ecology on a finite planet (2019, background): “2 (on sustainable consumption and production) with specific quantified goals for global material footprint (ideally, reduction down to 50 billion tons per year) and material footprint per capita, building on work by Bringezu (2015), Dittrich et al.”
Growth in Environmental Footprints and Environmental Impacts Embodied in Trade: Resource Efficiency Indicators from EXIOBASE3 (2018, background): “…as: a carbon footprint of 2.0 to 2.5 tonnes of CO2 per capita to stay within a 2° target; a material footprint of 5 to 10 tonnes per capita (see Bringezu 2015); a water footprint of circa 150 m3 per capita (with ranges of 100 to 600 m3); and a land use footprint of 10 ha per capita (Hoekstra…”