From extraction to end-uses and waste management: Modeling economy-wide material cycles and stock dynamics around the world.

Material stocks of infrastructure, buildings, and machinery are the biophysical basis of production and consumption. They are a crucial lever for resource efficiency and a sustainable circular economy. While material stock research has proliferated over the last years, most studies investigated specific materials or end-uses, usually not embedded into an economy-wide perspective.

Assessing the energy trap of industrial agriculture in North America and Europe: 82 balances from 1830 to 2012.

Unlabelled: Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat improved energy returns. However, most of these agricultural energy studies have focused only on external inputs at the crop level, concealing the important role of internal biomass flows that livestock and forestry recirculate within agroecosystems.

Diverse types of knowledge on a plate: a multi-perspective and multi-method approach for the transformation of urban food systems towards sustainable diets.

Urbanization processes are accompanied by growing global challenges for food systems. Urban actors are increasingly striving to address these challenges through a focus on sustainable diets. However, transforming food systems towards more sustainable diets is challenging and it is unclear what the local scope of action might be.

The global biodiversity footprint of urban consumption: A spatially explicit assessment for the city of Vienna.

With ongoing global urbanization processes and consumption patterns increasingly recognized as key determinants of environmental change, a better understanding of the links between urban consumption and biodiversity loss is paramount. Here we quantify the global biodiversity footprint (BDF) of Vienna's (Austria) biomass consumption. We present a state-of-the-art product specific approach to (a) locate the production areas required for Vienna's consumption and map Vienna's BDF by (b) linking them with data taken from a previously published countryside Species-Area-Relationship (cSAR) model with a representation of land-use intensity.

Compilation of an economy-wide material flow database for 14 stock-building materials in 177 countries from 1900 to 2016.

International datasets on economy-wide material flows currently fail to comprehensively cover the quantitatively most important materials and countries, to provide centennial coverage and to differentiate between processing stages. These data gaps hamper research and policy on resource use. Herein, we present and document the data processing and compilation procedures applied to develop a novel economy-wide database of primary stock-building material flows systematically covering 177 countries from 1900- 2016.

Relative effects of land conversion and land-use intensity on terrestrial vertebrate diversity.

Land-use has transformed ecosystems over three quarters of the terrestrial surface, with massive repercussions on biodiversity. Land-use intensity is known to contribute to the effects of land-use on biodiversity, but the magnitude of this contribution remains uncertain. Here, we use a modified countryside species-area model to compute a global account of the impending biodiversity loss caused by current land-use patterns, explicitly addressing the role of land-use intensity based on two sets of intensity indicators.

Land use intensification increasingly drives the spatiotemporal patterns of the global human appropriation of net primary production in the last century.

Land use has greatly transformed Earth's surface. While spatial reconstructions of how the extent of land cover and land-use types have changed during the last century are available, much less information exists about changes in land-use intensity. In particular, global reconstructions that consistently cover land-use intensity across land-use types and ecosystems are missing.

Measuring Progress towards a Circular Economy: A Monitoring Framework for Economy-wide Material Loop Closing in the EU28.

The concept of a circular economy (CE) is gaining increasing attention from policy makers, industry, and academia. There is a rapidly evolving debate on definitions, limitations, the contribution to a wider sustainability agenda, and a need for indicators to assess the effectiveness of circular economy measures at larger scales. Herein, we present a framework for a comprehensive and economy-wide biophysical assessment of a CE, utilizing and systematically linking official statistics on resource extraction and use and waste flows in a mass-balanced approach.

From resource extraction to outflows of wastes and emissions: The socioeconomic metabolism of the global economy, 1900-2015.

The size and structure of the socioeconomic metabolism are key for the planet's sustainability. In this article, we provide a consistent assessment of the development of material flows through the global economy in the period 1900-2015 using material flow accounting in combination with results from dynamic stock-flow modelling. Based on this approach, we can trace materials from extraction to their use, their accumulation in in-use stocks and finally to outflows of wastes and emissions and provide a comprehensive picture of the evolution of societies metabolism during global industrialization.

At the core of the socio-ecological transition: Agroecosystem energy fluxes in Austria 1830-2010.

Analyses of energy efficiency in biomass production offer important insights in the context of sustainable land management and biomass production. However, much of the previous research on the topic has focused on the energy efficiency of either food or energy provision. Only recently, comprehensive analyses at the total agroecosystem level have been operationalized, studying long-term change in agroecosystem energetics in the course of the socio-ecological transition.

Regional specialization and market integration: agroecosystem energy transitions in Upper Austria.

We investigate agroecosystem energy flows in two Upper Austrian regions, the lowland region Sankt Florian and the prealpine region Grünburg, at five time points between 1830 and 2000. Energetic agroecosystem productivity (energy contents of crops, livestock products, and wood per unit area) is compared to different types of energy inputs, i.e.

Global socioeconomic material stocks rise 23-fold over the 20th century and require half of annual resource use.

Human-made material stocks accumulating in buildings, infrastructure, and machinery play a crucial but underappreciated role in shaping the use of material and energy resources. Building, maintaining, and in particular operating in-use stocks of materials require raw materials and energy. Material stocks create long-term path-dependencies because of their longevity.

The global metabolic transition: Regional patterns and trends of global material flows, 1950-2010.

Since the World War II, many economies have transitioned from an agrarian, biomass-based to an industrial, minerals-based metabolic regime. Since 1950, world population grew by factor 2.7 and global material consumption by factor 3.

Accounting for the Material Stock of Nations.

National material stock (MS) accounts have been a neglected field of analysis in industrial ecology, possibly because of the difficulty in establishing such accounts. In this research, we propose a novel method to model national MS based on historical material flow data. This enables us to avoid the laborious data work involved with bottom-up accounts for stocks and to arrive at plausible levels of stock accumulation for nations.

Resource Use in Small Island States: Material Flows in Iceland and Trinidad and Tobago, 1961-2008.

Iceland and Trinidad and Tobago are small open, high-income island economies with very specific resource-use patterns. This article presents a material flow analysis (MFA) for the two countries covering a time period of nearly five decades. Both countries have a narrow domestic resource base, their economy being largely based on the exploitation of one or two key resources for export production.

Development and dematerialization: an international study.

Economic development and growth depend on growing levels of resource use, and result in environmental impacts from large scale resource extraction and emissions of waste. In this study, we examine the resource dependency of economic activities over the past several decades for a set of countries comprising developing, emerging and mature industrialized economies. Rather than a single universal industrial development pathway, we find a diversity of economic dependencies on material use, made evident through cluster analysis.

Global human appropriation of net primary production doubled in the 20th century.

Global increases in population, consumption, and gross domestic product raise concerns about the sustainability of the current and future use of natural resources. The human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) provides a useful measure of human intervention into the biosphere. The productive capacity of land is appropriated by harvesting or burning biomass and by converting natural ecosystems to managed lands with lower productivity.

Europe's other debt crisis caused by the long legacy of future extinctions.

Rapid economic development in the past century has translated into severe pressures on species survival as a result of increasing land-use change, environmental pollution, and the spread of invasive alien species. However, though the impact of these pressures on biodiversity is substantial, it could be seriously underestimated if population declines of plants and animals lag behind contemporary environmental degradation. Here, we test for such a delay in impact by relating numbers of threatened species appearing on national red lists to historical and contemporary levels of socioeconomic pressures.

Long-term trajectories of the human appropriation of net primary production: Lessons from six national case studies.

The 'human appropriation of net primary production' (HANPP) is an integrated socio-ecological indicator measuring effects of land use on ecological biomass flows. Based on published data for Austria, Hungary, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain and the UK, this paper investigates long-term trends in aboveground HANPP and discusses the relations between population, economic growth, changes in biomass use and land-use intensity and their influences on national HANPP trajectories. During early stages of industrialization, population growth and increasing demand for biomass drive land-cover change, often resulting in deforestation, which raises HANPP.

India's biophysical economy, 1961-2008. Sustainability in a national and global context.

India's economic growth in the last decade has raised several concerns in terms of its present and future resource demands for materials and energy. While per capita resource consumption is still extremely modest but on the rise, its sheer population qualifies India as a fast growing giant with material and energy throughput that is growing rapidly . If such national and local trends continue, the challenges for regional, national as well as global sustainability are immense in terms of future resource availability, social conflicts, pressure on land and ecosystems and atmospheric emissions.

Natural and socioeconomic determinants of the embodied human appropriation of net primary production and its relation to other resource use indicators.

Indicators of resource use such as material and energy flow accounts, emission data and the ecological footprint inform societies about their performance by evaluating resource use efficiency and the effectiveness of sustainability policies. The human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) is an indicator of land-use intensity on each nation's territory used in research as well as in environmental reports. 'Embodied HANPP' (eHANPP) measures the HANPP anywhere on earth resulting from a nation's domestic biomass consumption.

Changes in water and land: the reconstructed Viennese riverscape from 1500 to the present.

Medieval Vienna was situated at the main arm of the swiftly flowing alpine Danube. From the fourteenth century onwards, the river gradually moved away from the city. This marked the beginning of 500 years of human intervention to prevent further displacement of the river and to preserve the waterway as a vital supply line.