The impacts of data deviations between MRIO models on material footprints: A comparison of EXIOBASE, Eora, and ICIO.

In various international policy processes such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals, an urgent demand for robust consumption-based indicators of material flows, or material footprints (MFs), has emerged over the past years. Yet, MFs for national economies diverge when calculated with different Global Multiregional Input-Output (GMRIO) databases, constituting a significant barrier to a broad policy uptake of these indicators. The objective of this paper is to quantify the impact of data deviations between GMRIO databases on the resulting MF.

Data on the domestic processed output, balancing items, and solid waste potential for five major world economies.

This data article reports the domestic processed output (DPO), balancing items, and solid waste potential for five major world economies (Australia, China, Germany, Japan, and the United States of America) for the years 1990-2015. The main DPO database assembles data from a number of national and international sources. Linking this with data on domestic material consumption and the calculation of balancing items, we have been able to provide fully balanced inputs and outputs for these five economies.

Sustainable urban systems: Co-design and framing for transformation.

Rapid urbanisation generates risks and opportunities for sustainable development. Urban policy and decision makers are challenged by the complexity of cities as social-ecological-technical systems. Consequently there is an increasing need for collaborative knowledge development that supports a whole-of-system view, and transformational change at multiple scales.

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.

Stochastic Analysis and Forecasts of the Patterns of Speed, Acceleration, and Levels of Material Stock Accumulation in Society.

The recent acceleration of urbanization and industrialization of many parts of the developing world, most notably in Asia, has resulted in a fast-increasing demand for and accumulation of construction materials in society. Despite the importance of physical stocks in society, the empirical assessment of total material stock of buildings and infrastructure and reasons for its growth have been underexplored in the sustainability literature. We propose an innovative approach for explaining material stock dynamics in society and create a country typology for stock accumulation trajectories using the ARIMA (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average) methodology, a stochastic approach commonly used in business studies and economics to inspect and forecast time series.

Australia is 'free to choose' economic growth and falling environmental pressures.

Over two centuries of economic growth have put undeniable pressure on the ecological systems that underpin human well-being. While it is agreed that these pressures are increasing, views divide on how they may be alleviated. Some suggest technological advances will automatically keep us from transgressing key environmental thresholds; others that policy reform can reconcile economic and ecological goals; while a third school argues that only a fundamental shift in societal values can keep human demands within the Earth's ecological limits.

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.

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.

The material footprint of nations.

Metrics on resource productivity currently used by governments suggest that some developed countries have increased the use of natural resources at a slower rate than economic growth (relative decoupling) or have even managed to use fewer resources over time (absolute decoupling). Using the material footprint (MF), a consumption-based indicator of resource use, we find the contrary: Achievements in decoupling in advanced economies are smaller than reported or even nonexistent. We present a time series analysis of the MF of 186 countries and identify material flows associated with global production and consumption networks in unprecedented specificity.