Contributions of sociometabolic research to sustainability science

Abstract

Recent high-level agreements such as the Paris climate accord or the Sustainable Development Goals aim at mitigating climate change, ecological degradation and biodiversity loss while pursuing social goals such as reducing hunger or poverty. Systemic approaches bridging natural and social sciences are required to support these agendas. The surging human use of biophysical resources (materials, energy) results from the pursuit of social and economic goals, while it also drives global environmental change. Socio-metabolic research links the study of socioeconomic processes with biophysical processes and thus plays a pivotal role for understanding societynature interactions. It includes a broad range of systems science approaches for measuring, analyzing and modelling of biophysical stocks and flows as well as the services they provide to society. Here we outline and systematize major socio-metabolic research traditions that study the biophysical basis of economic activity: urban metabolism, the multi-scale integrated assessment of societal and ecosystem metabolism, biophysical economics, material and energy flow analysis, and environmentally extended input-output analysis. Examples from recent research demonstrate strengths and weaknesses of socio-metabolic research. We discuss future research directions that could also help to enrich related fields.

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part I: bibliometric and conceptual mapping

“…Furthermore, to understand decoupling, a differentiation between "production-based" and 'consumption-based' approaches is indispensable, as it takes the increasing role of global trade into account (Peters 2008, Peters et al 2012, Steininger et al 2015, Haberl et al 2019. Lately also a third perspective, income-based responsibility, has been proposed, although there is little literature available so far (Marques et al 2012, Steininger et al 2015.…”

“…This includes the necessity for a differentiated perspective on resource efficiency along material and energy conversion chains (Zhang et al 2018), and the importance of international trade, i.e. the relevance of productionbased and consumption-based approaches (Krausmann et al 2017, Zhang et al 2018, Haberl et al 2019. Datasets are increasingly becoming available that go beyond aggregate indicators and trace materials and energy carriers from extraction to final uses, their accumulation in stocks of manufactured capital and the resulting wastes and emissions, strictly following thermodynamic principles and mass-balances (Kovanda 2017, Krausmann et al 2018, Martinico-Perez et al 2018, Schandl and Miatto 2018, Vilaysouk et al 2019.…”

Samothraki in Transition: A Report on a Real-World Lab to Promote the Sustainability of a Greek Island

“…Guiding local sustainable development means to understand the conditions under which socio-economic activities can support the quality of life and the income of the islanders while sustaining (or even improving) the quality and resilience of the natural environment. Such a comprehensive research question can best be addressed by focusing on the exchange relations between the respective socio-economic sectors and the local environment with the help of a heuristic sociometabolic model [18,19] as outlined in Figure 4, specified for the case at hand. When critical stocks cannot be reproduced, the system might 'collapse' [21,22].…”

The service-stock trap: analysis of the environmental impacts and productivity of the service sector in Hungary

“…Furthermore, construction materials are scarce as well; sand, for example, became a basic resource with a limited supply and numerous harmful environmental impacts (Torres et al 2017). To this end, the key role of material stocks, as infrastructures, has recently been emphasized with special regard to future emissions and resource use (Wood et al 2018, Haberl et al 2019. Furthermore, several results suggest that a significant part of the material stock consists of capital stock of the economic processes (Ortlepp et al 2015, Cao et al 2017.…”