Regional Material Flow Accounting and Environmental Pressures: The Spanish Case

Abstract

This paper explores potential contributions of regional material flow accounting to the characterization of environmental pressures. With this aim, patterns of material extraction, trade, consumption, and productivity for the Spanish regions were studied within the 1996-2010 period. The main methodological variation as compared to whole-country based approaches is the inclusion of interregional trade, which can be separately assessed from the international exchanges. Each region was additionally profiled regarding its commercial exchanges with the rest of the regions and the rest of the world and the related environmental pressures. Given its magnitude, interregional trade is a significant source of environmental pressure. Most of the exchanges occur across regions and different extractive and trading patterns also arise at this scale. These differences are particularly great for construction minerals, which in Spain represent the largest share of extracted and consumed materials but do not cover long distances, so their impact is visible mainly at the regional level. During the housing bubble, economic growth did not improve material productivity.

Urban Metabolism of Intermediate Cities: The Material Flow Analysis, Hinterlands and the Logistics‐Hub Function of Rennes and Le Mans (France)

“…The comparison shows a very clear difference among these territories: apart from DMI and DMO, all the indicators of the two intermediate cities here fall within those of the Paris Metropolitan area, on the one hand, and those of Ariège and Haute-Garonne, on the other hand. The level of material consumption (11.2 t/cap and 11.7 t/cap for DMC and DMC corr ) is also quite similar to those of other European cities (Rosado et al 2014;Sastre et al 2015;Rosado et al 2016;Athanassiadis et al 2017), as well as the French average (12 t/cap according to the CGDD 9 ).…”

“…; Sastre et al. ; Voskamp et al. ), especially as cross‐flows are excluded from imports and exports in these works.…”

“…How-ever, it should be noted that few megacities also have important logistical roles, including those that are also harbors or strategically located. For example, DMI and DMO are also important for Barcelona, Amsterdam, or Gothenburg (Rosado et al 2014;Sastre et al 2015;Voskamp et al 2017), especially as crossflows are excluded from imports and exports in these works. The role of big harbors serves as gateways for international and national trade (Rosado et al 2014).…”

Towards an Urban Resilience Index: A Case Study in 50 Spanish Cities

“…Comparing the ecological footprint of the city with the bioregion's biocapacity, taking into account other urban settlements in the area, allows us to analyze the urban rural-interface [76] and self-sufficiency of the urban system in a more realistic manner [85]. Furthermore, our indicator for carrying capacity excess did not take into account ecosystem services, taking for granted that if the city does not exceed its carrying capacity, it will not import or export any materials, and all of the ecosystem services it needs will be provided by itself, when regions are usually specialized and import materials, energy and resources from other regions or countries [89]. Nevertheless, no matter what method we are using to measure carrying capacity excess, some results would not vary too much.…”

The fishing footprint of a tourism-based economy: displacing seafood consumption from local to distant waters in the Balearic Islands

“…This dynamic can be conceptualized as marine and coastal gentrification (Blázquez 2013;Morell and Franquesa 2011;Vives 2011). The study of regional scale social metabolism over long periods, applying methodologies such as the ecological footprint of consumption or material flow accounting, is still controversial, mainly due to data limitations, especially for trade statistics (Carpintero 2015;Sastre et al 2015). For this reason, in the next 1940 1943 1946 1949 1952 1955 1958 1961 1964 1967 1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 sections I make an analysis of the ecological footprint for the whole period, 1940-2012, followed by the ecological footprint of seafood consumption narrowed for a shorter period that coincides with the neoliberal period .…”