Estimating current and future global urban domestic material consumption

Abstract

Urban material resource requirements are significant at the global level and these are expected to expand with future urban population growth. However, there are no global scale studies on the future material consumption of urban areas. This paper provides estimates of global urban domestic material consumption (DMC) in 2050 using three approaches based on: current gross statistics; a regression model; and a transition theoretic logistic model. All methods use UN urban population projections and assume a simple 'business-as-usual' scenario wherein historical aggregate trends in income and material flow continue into the future. A collation of data for 152 cities provided a year 2000 world average DMC/capita estimate, 12 tons/person/year (±22%), which we combined with UN population projections to produce a first-order estimation of urban DMC at 2050 of ∼73 billion tons/year (±22%). Urban DMC/capita was found to be significantly correlated (R 2 > 0.9) to urban GDP/capita and area per person through a power law relation used to obtain a second estimate of 106 billion tons (±33%) in 2050. The inelastic exponent of the power law indicates a global tendency for relative decoupling of direct urban material consumption with increasing income. These estimates are global and influenced by the current proportion of developed-world cities in the global population of cities (and in our sample data). A third method employed a logistic model of transitions in urban DMC/capita with regional resolution. This method estimated global urban DMC to rise from approximately 40 billion tons/year in 2010 to ∼90 billion tons/year in 2050 (modelled range: 66-111 billion tons/year). DMC/capita across different regions was estimated to converge from a range of 5-27 tons/person/year in the year 2000 to around 8-17 tons/person/year in 2050. The urban population does not increase proportionally during this period and thus the global average DMC/capita increases from ∼12 to ∼14 tons/person/year, challenging resource decoupling targets.

Integrating lifecycle assessment and urban metabolism at city level: Comparison between Spanish cities

“…Moreover, the measurement of total flows is difficult and time consuming, since these are not available in a globally comprehensive data set. Hence, studies are being performed to define methods to estimate material requirements at the domestic level to give insights for future work (Baynes & Musango, ). LCA, and its underlying procedure for estimating the direct and indirect flows and the impacts associated with a specific process or system, can make significant contributions to knowledge for UM analysis (Chester et al., ) and can generate insights into the connections between urban flows, resource depletion, and damage to ecosystem quality.…”

Monitoring domestic material consumption at lower territorial levels: A novel data downscaling method

“…Affluence stands for the level of consumption and it is generally approximated by GDP/pop. Technology can be interpreted as the particular means by which affluence is generated (Baynes & Musango, 2018;Fischer-Kowalski et al, 2011) and it is often approximated by measures of economic structure (e.g., manufacturing or industrial share of GDP) (Cole & Neumayer, 2004;Shi, 2003). Given the limited set of covariates considered, the STIRPAT framework might be criticized as a reductionist approach in a context where it is plausible to assume that other factors would causally influence the response variable (i.e., DMC) (Hummel et al, 2013 in providing a robust, transparent, systematic and easy-to-apply approach to infer regional estimates, the development of a more complex and sensitive model was excluded.…”

Urbanization in Northern Corridor Economic Region in Malaysia

“…The government of Malaysia is rapidly realising the accelerated challenge in a number of sectors. The territorial plan has been broadened to the NCER [57].…”

“…The semi-interquartile range is 0.5. Baynes and Musango [57] implied that urban material resource specifications are important at the worldwide stage and these are projected to increase with upcoming urban inhabitant development. Urban domestic material Urbanization in the Northern Corridor Economic Region DOI: http://dx.doi.org /10.5772/intechopen.84145 consumption is importantly associated to urban GDP and the opposite of inhabitant denseness in a multivariate regression that is consistent with preceding statistical analysis at the national stage.…”