Abstract
As the world’s top material consumer, China has created intense pressure on national or global demand for natural resources. Building an accurate material stocks and flows account of China is a prerequisite for promoting sustainable resource management. However, there is no annually, officially published material stocks and flows data in China. Existing material stocks and flows estimates conducted by scholars exhibit great discrepancies. In this study, we create the Provincial Material Stocks and Flows Database (PMSFD) for China and its 31 provinces. This dataset describes 13 materials’ stocks, demand, and scrap supply in five end-use sectors in each province during 1978–2018. PMSFD is the first version of material stocks and flows inventories in China, and its uniform estimation structure and formatted inventories offer a comprehensive foundation for future accumulation, modification, and enhancement. PMSFD contributes insight into the material metabolism, which is an important database for sustainable development as well as circular economy policy-making in China. This dataset will be updated annually.
Highlights
Background & SummaryModern society is enabled by the use of various materials[1,2]
The 20th century is an era of explosion of human civilization and accomplished achievements, which is accompanied by the ever-accelerating annual extraction of biomass by a factor of 3.6, of fossil fuels by 12, of ores and minerals by 27, and of construction materials by 34 times[1,3,4,5,6]
As one of the concerns of sustainability science, material metabolism, which quantifies the flows of materials and energy into and out of human societies, urgently needs the material stocks and flows data to describe and analyze the metabolic processes[8,9,10]
Summary
Modern society is enabled by the use of various materials[1,2]. The 20th century is an era of explosion of human civilization and accomplished achievements, which is accompanied by the ever-accelerating annual extraction of biomass by a factor of 3.6, of fossil fuels by 12, of ores and minerals by 27, and of construction materials by 34 times[1,3,4,5,6]. With rapid urbanization and industrialization, the materials stocks in China have been experiencing a sharp increasing pattern[4,19,20,21,22], and China’s share of global material stocks increased from 10% to 22%4 It has been catching up with developed countries since the 1990s, and only took 20 years to get to the stocks level that industrialized countries had achieved within 70 years. PMSTD may be used to facilitate retrospective analyses and prospective forecasts of stocks and flows to assist in identifying and achieving sustainable development. We will advance this goal through this initial version of PMSTD, and update the PMSTD annually. The rest of this paper introduces the estimation approach used to create the PMSFD, the file format used to record the PMSFD, and the properties of the data in the PMSFD
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