Helga Weisz

Methodology and Indicators of Economy-wide Material Flow Accounting

Summary This contribution presents the state of the art of economywide material flow accounting. Starting from a brief recollection of the intellectual and policy history of this approach, we outline system definition, key methodological assumptions, and derived indicators. The next section makes an effort to establish data reliability and uncertainty for a number of existing multinational (European and global) material flow accounting (MFA) data compilations and discusses sources of inconsistencies and variations for some indicators and trends. The results show that the methodology has reached a certain maturity: Coefficients of variation between databases lie in the range of 10% to 20%, and correlations between databases across countries amount to an average R 2 of 0.95. After discussing some of the research frontiers for further methodological development, we conclude that the material flow accounting framework and the data generated have reached a maturity that warrants material flow indicators to complement traditional economic and demographic information in providing a sound basis for discussing national and international policies for sustainable resource use.

Carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK

A growing body of literature discusses the CO2 emissions of cities. Still, little is known about emission patterns across density gradients from remote rural places to highly urbanized areas, the drivers behind those emission patterns and the global emissions triggered by consumption in human settlements—referred to here as the carbon footprint. In this letter we use a hybrid method for estimating the carbon footprints of cities and other human settlements in the UK explicitly linking global supply chains to local consumption activities and associated lifestyles. This analysis comprises all areas in the UK, whether rural or urban. We compare our consumption-based results with extended territorial CO2 emission estimates and analyse the driving forces that determine the carbon footprint of human settlements in the UK. Our results show that 90% of the human settlements in the UK are net importers of CO2 emissions. Consumption-based CO2 emissions are much more homogeneous than extended territorial emissions. Both the highest and lowest carbon footprints can be found in urban areas, but the carbon footprint is consistently higher relative to extended territorial CO2 emissions in urban as opposed to rural settlement types. The impact of high or low density living remains limited; instead, carbon footprints can be comparatively high or low across density gradients depending on the location-specific socio-demographic, infrastructural and geographic characteristics of the area under consideration. We show that the carbon footprint of cities and other human settlements in the UK is mainly determined by socio-economic rather than geographic and infrastructural drivers at the spatial aggregation of our analysis. It increases with growing income, education and car ownership as well as decreasing household size. Income is not more important than most other socio-economic determinants of the carbon footprint. Possibly, the relationship between lifestyles and infrastructure only impacts carbon footprints significantly at higher spatial granularity.

Changes in ecosystem processes induced by land use: Human appropriation of aboveground NPP and its influence on standing crop in Austria

Human land use influences important properties of terrestrial ecosystems, such as energy flow, standing crop, and biomass turnover. Human interference with ecological energy flows may be studied by calculating the “human appropriation of NPP” (HANPP), defined as the difference between the net primary production (NPP) of potential vegetation and the actual NPP remaining in ecosystems after harvest. Comparing the standing crops of the potential vegetation and actually prevailing vegetation, we demonstrate the human impact on the amount of carbon stored in living vegetation. We discuss these concepts using empirical results for aboveground vegetation in Austria calculated from statistical data and from land use and land cover models derived from remote-sensing data. According to our calculations the human appropriation of aboveground NPP in Austria today amounts to ∼50%. The aboveground standing crop (biomass stock) of the vegetation prevailing in Austria today is ∼64% lower than that of the potential vegetation.

Urban Energy Systems

Executive Summary More than 50% of the global population already lives in urban settlements and urban areas are projected to absorb almost all the global population growth to 2050, amounting to some additional three billion people. Over the next decades the increase in rural population in many developing countries will be overshadowed by population flows to cities. Rural populations globally are expected to peak at a level of 3.5 billion people by around 2020 and decline thereafter, albeit with heterogeneous regional trends. This adds urgency in addressing rural energy access, but our common future will be predominantly urban. Most of urban growth will continue to occur in small-to medium-sized urban centers. Growth in these smaller cities poses serious policy challenges, especially in the developing world. In small cities, data and information to guide policy are largely absent, local resources to tackle development challenges are limited, and governance and institutional capacities are weak, requiring serious efforts in capacity building, novel applications of remote sensing, information, and decision support techniques, and new institutional partnerships. While ‘megacities’ with more than 10 million inhabitants have distinctive challenges, their contribution to global urban growth will remain comparatively small. Energy-wise, the world is already predominantly urban. This assessment estimates that between 60–80% of final energy use globally is urban, with a central estimate of 75%. Applying national energy (or GHG inventory) reporting formats to the urban scale and to urban administrative boundaries is often referred to as a ‘production’ accounting approach and underlies the above GEA estimate.

Global Environmental Change and Historical Transitions

What do transition processes in rural areas in Thailand, biomass consumption in nineteenth-century Austria and the ecology of hunter-gatherers have to do with the appropriation of plant production and global environmental change? More than one might think of in the first place. They are part of a scholarly discourse on our changing relations with the environment. We argue that global change can be analysed in terms of transitions between major modes of subsistence and try to document this with several case studies.

Industrial Ecology: The role of manufactured capital in sustainability

In 1992 PNAS presented a Special Feature with 22 contributions from a colloquium entitled “Industrial Ecology,” held at the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in Washington, DC (1). In these articles Industrial Ecology was presented as an approach to understand and ultimately optimize the total material cycles of industrial processes (2).

SOCIETY-NATURE COEVOLUTION: INTERDISCIPLINARY CONCEPT FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Abstract. A brief historical background to the currently ascending interest in evolutionary and coevolutionary theory is sketched, and the concept of society–nature coevolution is positioned in this broader field. The significance of society–nature coevolutionary pathways for transition to sustainability is highlighted with Schellnhubers heuristic ‘theater world’ for representing paradigms of sustainable development. Geographys recent re‐engagement in the geographical experiment of keeping society and nature under one conceptual umbrella is exemplified in the works of Hägerstrand and Harvey. This special issues four contributions to developing society–nature coevolutionary theory are presented. The outlook these articles provide suggests that research into society–nature coevolution should play a key role in identifying physically, biologically and socially accessible pathways to sustainability. In order to keep the future accessible and navigable, we will need enhanced understanding of society–nature coevolution.

Gesellschaft als Verzahnung materieller und symbolischer Welten

Im folgenden Beitrag mochten wir den theoretischen Ansatz des Wiener Teams Soziale Okologie1 beschreiben und auf seine Leistungsfahigkeit abklopfen. Dieser Ansatz geht davon aus, das „Gesellschaft“ aus dem Zusammenwirken von symbolischen oder kulturellen Systemen (also etwa dem, was Luhmann mit Gesellschaft meint), und materiellen Elementen, zum Beispiel der menschlichen Bevolkerung, verstanden werden mus. Auf dieser Basis lassen sich, so finden wir, Gesellschaft-Natur-Interaktionen angemessen beschreiben, ohne in naturalistische oder kulturalistische Reduktionen zu verfallen. Nur wenige zeitgenossische soziologische Theorien sind hier hilfreich.2 Die meisten beschreiben, vereinfacht gesagt, Gesellschaft und Okonomie als hochkomplexe Einheiten, die alleine „von innen heraus“ verstanden werden konnen. Umgeben werden diese von einer undifferenzierten, und fur die innere Dynamik weitgehend irrelevanten „Umwelt“. Die Naturwissenschaften sehen das genau umgekehrt. Fur sie sind naturliche Systeme hochkomplex. „Der Mensch“ hingegen wird als einheitlicher Akteur angesehen, der naturliche Systeme „stort“. Dem inneren Funktionszusammenhang von Gesellschaft angemessene Begriffe fehlen. Fur ein Verstandnis der heutigen Umweltprobleme sind jedoch ausreichend komplexe Begriffe von Gesellschaft, Natur und ihren Wechselwirkungen notig. Nur so kann eine erkenntnistheoretische Grundlage fur die interdisziplinare Bearbeitung von Umwelt- und Nachhaltigkeitsproblemen geschaffen werden, an der Natur- und Sozialwissenschaften gleichermasen ansetzen konnen.

THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE: SOCIETY–NATURE COEVOLUTION

Abstract. This article aims to show how evolutionary theory, social‐metabolism and sociological systems theory can be utilized to develop a concept of society–nature coevolution. The article begins with a conception of industrialization as a socio‐metabolic transition, that is, a major transformation in the energetic and consequently material basis of society. This transition to industrial metabolism was essential for the emergence and maintenance of industrial societies and is at the same time the main cause of global environmental change. The article proceeds by asking what the notion of society–nature coevolution can potentially contribute to understanding environmental sustainability problems. An elaborated concept of coevolution hinges on (1) a more precise and sociologically more meaningful concept of cultural evolution and (2) understanding how cultural evolution is linked to the environment. Next I briefly outline major lines of thought and controversies surrounding the idea of cultural evolution. The direction proposed here commences with an abstract version of Darwinian evolution, which is then re‐specified for social systems, understood as communication systems, as developed by Luhmann. The re‐specification implies three important changes in the theoretical outline of cultural evolution: first, shifting from the human population to the communication system as the unit of cultural evolution and to single communications as the unit of cultural variation; second, shifting from transmission or inheritance to reproduction as necessary condition for evolution; and third, shifting from purely internal (communicative) forces of selection towards including also environmental selection. Adopting elements from the work of Hägerstrand and Boserup, the primary environmental selective force in cultural evolution is conceptualized as the historically variable constraints in human time–space occupation. In the conclusions I tie the argument back to its beginning, by arguing that the most radical changes in human time–space occupation have been enabled by major socio‐metabolic transitions in the energy system.

The Archipelago of Social Ecology and the Island of the Vienna School

Social Ecology is an interdisciplinary research field rooted in the traditions of both the Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. The common denominator of this research field is not a shared label but a shared paradigm. Related labels that extend beyond Social Ecology include Human Ecology, Industrial Ecology, Ecological Economics and Socioecological Systems Analysis. The core axioms of the shared paradigm are that human social and natural systems interact, coevolve over time and have substantial impacts upon one another, with causality working in both directions. Social Ecology offers a conceptual approach to society-nature coevolution pertaining to history, to current development processes and to a future sustainability transition. This chapter reviews several academic traditions that have contributed to the emergence of this paradigm and then describes the research areas belonging to the field. One cluster deals with society’s biophysical structures (such as energy and society, land use and food production and social metabolism, the field covered by Industrial Ecology and Ecological Economics). Other clusters identify the environmental impacts of human societies (such as the IPAT and footprint approaches), biohistory and society-nature coevolution. Another research area considers regulation, governance and sustainability transitions. In the last section, we describe the distinguishing characteristics of the Vienna Social Ecology School.