The Material Stock–Flow–Service Nexus: A New Approach for Tackling the Decoupling Conundrum
By H. Haberl, Dominik Wiedenhofer, K. Erb, Christoph Görg, F. Krausmann. 2017
131 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Fundamental changes in the societal use of biophysical resources are required for a sustainability transformation. Current socioeconomic metabolism research traces flows of energy, materials or substances to capture resource use: input of raw materials or energy, their fate in production and consumption, and the discharge of wastes and emissions. This approach has yielded important insights into eco-efficiency and long-term drivers of resource use. But socio-metabolic research has not yet fully incorporated material stocks or their services, hence not completely exploiting the analytic power of the metabolism concept. This commentary argues for a material stock–flow–service nexus approach focused on the analysis of interrelations between material and energy flows, socioeconomic material stocks (“in-use stocks of materials”) and the services provided by specific stock/flow combinations. Analyzing the interrelations between stocks, flows and services will allow researchers to develop highly innovative indicators of eco-efficiency and open new research directions that will help to better understand biophysical foundations of transformations towards sustainability.
Subfields: Ecology, Environmental Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/950d338fd6965792694abc898d97080ff1fd895e
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In Ecology
In Environmental Engineering
- H. Haberl
- F. Krausmann
- Dominik Wiedenhofer
- Andreas Mayer
- Daniel Hausknost
- A. Schaffartzik
- T. Fishman
- Felix Creutzig
Citations in the corpus
- A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part I: bibliometric and conceptual mapping (2020, background): “They are utilized to provide functions and services to society by utilizing stocks of infrastructure, buildings and machinery, ultimately and necessarily resulting in waste and emissions (Pauliuk andMüller 2014, Weisz et al 2015, Haberl et al 2017).”
- A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “…more insights can be expected by moving from studies of the decoupling of GDP from one resource or emission indicator to analysing interdependencies between GDP and multiple resources flows, respectively material stocks and resource or emission flows (Haberl et al 2017, Krausmann et al 2017c).”