Materials Use Across World Regions

Summary The notion of a (socio-) metabolic transition has been used todescribe fundamental changes in socioeconomic energy andmaterial use during industrialization. During the last century,Japandevelopedfromalargelyagrarianeconomytooneoftheworld’s leading industrial nations. It is one of the few industrialcountries that has experienced prolonged dematerializationand recently has adopted a rigorous resource policy. This arti-cle investigates changes in Japan’s metabolism during industri-alization on the basis of a material flow account for the periodfrom 1878 to 2005. It presents annual data for material ex-traction, trade, and domestic consumption by major materialgroup and explores the relations among population growth,economic development, and material (and energy) use. Dur-ing the observed period, the size of Japan’s metabolism grewby a factor of 40, and the share of mineral and fossil materialsin domestic material consumption (DMC) grew to more than90%. Much of the growth in the Japanese metabolism wasbased on imported materials and occurred in only 20 yearsafter World War II (WWII), when Japan rapidly built up largestocks of built infrastructure, developed heavy industry, andadopted patterns of mass production and consumption. Thesurge in material use came to an abrupt halt with the firstoil crisis, however. Material use stabilized, and the economyeventually began to dematerialize. Although gross domesticproduct (GDP) grew much faster than material use, improve-mentsinmaterialintensityarearelativelyrecentphenomenon.Japanemergesasarolemodelforthemetabolictransitionbutis also exceptional in many ways.www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jie

Implementing the Results of Material Flow Analysis

The article discusses key aspects to be considered for the orientation of sustainable resource policies. Resource management at the local scale needs to be supplemented by governmental action in order to adjust production and consumption toward acceptable levels of global resource use. What is acceptable is being informed by scientific findings on environmental degradation and relevant cause–effect relationships. However, the desired state of the environment, the tolerable level of uncertainties about environmental impacts, risks of societal conflicts, and ethical considerations all involve normative considerations. Policy decisions for sustainable global resource use must be taken on the basis of imperfect information. A wider systems perspective, longer time horizon, and broader involvement of available knowledge could provide a sufficiently valid basis to derive directionally safe targets. Possible proxy targets for global biotic and abiotic resource use, considering land, biodiversity, and water issues, are presented on a per-person basis for 2050 for further discussion and research. These values could be used to assess the resource footprints of countries with regard to sustainability, providing orientation for governments and industry.

The National Natural Park Corales del Rosario y San Bernardo, located in the Caribbean Sea, is one of the most important parks in Colombia since it hosts high biological biodiversity, receives more tourists than any other natural park in the country and provides sustenance to several communities settled in and around it. However, lack of governance and incompatibility of incentives among authorities, communities and visitors threaten its conservation and sustainability. Using experimental economic games with fisherman communities, we tested different rules related with the management of natural resources in the protected area. In addition to standard rules of communication and external regulation, we tested a rule called co-management, in which we explored the complementarities between repeated communication and external non-coercive authority intervention. We also tested inter temporal effects where over extraction (by the group) in a round reduces the availability of resource for next round and, in consequence, increases effort and reduces benefits for fishers. Results confirmed the effectiveness of communication and, to some extent, external regulation. More important than that, co-management treatment exhibit no matter the location of the communities with respect to the park- the best results in terms of sustainable use of the resource. Participants incorporated dynamic implications in their decisions when information asymmetries were overcome, through internal communication or external guidance. These results highlight the importance of resource management designs that recognize communities as key actors in decision making for the sustainable use and conservation of common pool resources in protected areas.

Participatory forest management has been globally studied and it has been argued that clearly defined boundaries for access of the community forest resources will lead to sustainable use of resources and enhanced sustainable livelihoods to the communities dependent on the forests for their survival. In contrast, however current studies indicate that while there are efforts to define spatial boundaries of resource use and the resource users within the community based forest management approaches, the definition of boundaries of resource use and resources users has proved more difficult, for instance when gathering relevant information and tools that can promote forest resource users partnerships,  engaging of different stakeholders, assisting local communities to organize, preparing for negotiations meetings, procedures, rules, logistics and equity considerations, negotiating for  the establishment of agreements and empowering  of the local communities. This book therefore provides a process that would guide the establishment of partnerships when establishing forest resources and resource users’ boundaries in order to enhance sustainable use of forest resources, mitigate conflicts and improve the livelihoods of communities depended on forests for their survival. Qualitative research design was employed in the book. All the forests involved in participatory forest management in Kenya namely: Keraite; Nyamweru, Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, Kakamega, Loita, and upper Imenti were selected for to provide information for writing the book. All the respondents were purposefully sampled from each category of interviewees namely: households living adjacent to the forest, various groups that are working in or with the communities in the management of the forest resources. Policy makers from government and a group of experts e.g. head of various government ministries and Non-Governmental organizations. To collect data semi-structured interviews were done for the respondents. All the data collected was analyzed through coding and grouping similar important ideas or phenomena from the research and then used for writing the book. It is explained in the book that functional partnerships, forest resources and resource user’s boundaries are needed for effective community participation in forest management. It is recommended that broad understanding of boundaries is a pre-requisite to ensure that community and other stakeholders appreciate resource use and the resource users within the community based forest management approaches so as to facilitate sustainable use of forest resources and enhanced community livelihoods of the forest dependent communities.

The rapid population and industrial growth in Zimbabwe has resulted in land degradation and negative impacts on the human and physical environment. The primary purpose of this chapter was to find out the various indigenous environmental management practices available in Chimanimani that can be adopted by other communities in the conservation and sustainable use of resources. Secondly, the study explored Indigenous Knowledge (IK) and environmental management practices that can be integrated in the teaching of Geography in secondary schools, in order to ensure there is sustainable use of resources for the current and future generations. The study was guided by Edward Said (1978) post-colonial theory. An interpretive research paradigm was adopted in the community case study. Data were generated through a documentary analysis of the Form 1–4 (2015–2022) Geography syllabus, individual and group WhatsApp chats with Geography teachers and face-to-face interviews with community indigenous environment experts. The population sample consisted of ten (10) Geography teachers drawn from three (3) secondary schools and (6) community elders who were purposively sampled from the Chimanimani community. Data were analysed by generating thick descriptions and themes. The study revealed that the Chimanimani community has cultural practices that can be adopted in the conservation of resources. The research further exposed that IK related to environmental management can be integrated in the teaching of Geography in secondary schools in order to enhance sustainable use and environmental management of resources. The study recommends the integration of Indigenous and Eurocentric models in the conservation and sustainable management of resources. The incorporation of more indigenous environmental management practices in the Geography curriculum in secondary schools can help to inculcate a culture of environmental conservation among learners and communities.KeywordsIndigenous Knowledge (IK)IntegrationEnvironmental ManagementChimanimani communityGeographySustainable

South African National Parks (SANParks) has a history of formal and informal natural resource use that is characterised by polarised views on national conservation interests and benefits to communities. Current efforts aim to determine the sustainability of existing resource use in parks and to formalise these activities through the development of resource use protocols. The resource use policy of SANParks outlines principles for sustainable resource use, including greater involvement of local communities in management of protected areas and an adaptive management approach to determining sustainable use levels. This paper examines three case studies on plant use in national parks with regard to the development of criteria and indicators for monitoring resource use, and the role of thresholds of potential concern in measuring effectiveness of managing for sustainable use levels. Opportunities and challenges for resource use management are identified. Findings show that platforms for discussion and knowledge sharing, including research committees and community associations, are critical to building relationships, trust and a shared vision of sustainable resource use between stakeholders. However, additional capacity building is needed to enable local community structures to manage internal social conflicts and jealousy, and to participate fully in monitoring efforts. Long-term monitoring is essential for developing flexible harvest prescriptions for plant use, but this is a time-consuming and resource-intensive exercise. Flexible management strategies are difficult to implement and sometimes command-and-control measures are necessary to protect rare or endangered species. A holistic approach that considers resource use in national parks as a complement to broader community development initiatives offers a way forward.Conservation implications: There is no blueprint for the development of sustainable resource use systems and resource use is often addressed according to multiple approaches in national parks. However, the SANParks resource use policy provides a necessary set of guiding principles for resource use management across the national park system that allows for monitoring progress.

South African National Parks (SANParks) has a history of formal and informal natural resource use that is characterised by polarised views on national conservation interests and benefits to communities. Current efforts aim to determine the sustainability of existing resource use in parks and to formalise these activities through the development of resource use protocols. The resource use policy of SANParks outlines principles for sustainable resource use, including greater involvement of local communities in management of protected areas and an adaptive management approach to determining sustainable use levels. This paper examines three case studies on plant use in national parks with regard to the development of criteria and indicators for monitoring resource use, and the role of thresholds of potential concern in measuring effectiveness of managing for sustainable use levels. Opportunities and challenges for resource use management are identified. Findings show that platforms for discussion and knowledge sharing, including research committees and community associations, are critical to building relationships, trust and a shared vision of sustainable resource use between stakeholders. However, additional capacity building is needed to enable local community structures to manage internal social conflicts and jealousy, and to participate fully in monitoring efforts. Long-term monitoring is essential for developing flexible harvest prescriptions for plant use, but this is a time-consuming and resource-intensive exercise. Flexible management strategies are difficult to implement and sometimes command-and-control measures are necessary to protect rare or endangered species. A holistic approach that considers resource use in national parks as a complement to broader community development initiatives offers a way forward. Conservation implications: There is no blueprint for the development of sustainable resource use systems and resource use is often addressed according to multiple approaches in national parks. However, the SANParks resource use policy provides a necessary set of guiding principles for resource use management across the national park system that allows for monitoring progress.

The topic of a sustainable use of natural resources, often understood as resource efficiency, has made its way up on the political agenda. But so far a fundamental change towards a sustainable use of resources has not been achieved. Not only the resource consumption is still growing and destroying more and more the ecosystems but also too often the exploitation of natural resources is still a story of violation of human rights and of intra- and intergenerational unfairness. This chapter describes in a first step the current resource policy landscape, then identifies challenges on the way to further progress and finally outlines next steps for addressing the challenges of the management of natural resources in the context of sustainable development. The analysis of the resource policy landscape shows three clusters of resource policies. The more operational the approaches are the more they are neglecting the inter-linkages amongst the various natural resources and/or the general requirements of sustainability. The challenge is to broaden the perspective of these more implementation oriented resource efficiency concepts into approaches which manage natural resources within a framework of sufficiency, fairness and responsibility, consistency and resilience. Important steps are seen in deeply rooting these principles into the public and private sector, in changing the institutional settings towards a more sustainable resource management. But also in a more systemic thinking, which addresses the nexus of the various resources and in implementing sustainable resource use in the civil society as a practice of daily life.

A global indicator of utilized wildlife populations: Regional trends and the impact of management

From resource extraction to outflows of wastes and emissions: The socioeconomic metabolism of the global economy, 1900-2015.

This study analyses the extent and spatial distribution of the forest resources and their energy potential in the province of Nuoro (Sardinia, Italy). The aim is to create a data base which will help decision makers to make a plan for the sustainable use of the resources of the territory. A GIS-based model was used to assess the energy capacity and suitability of the area. This model used four basic information layers: (1) slope, (2) hydro-geological constraints, (3) protected areas, (4) forest districts under regional forest management. These four criteria are of great importance when attempting to assess the quantity of available sustainable biomass. Based on their potential energy production, 140 basins were identified, which could provide enough forest biomass to fuel all the heating systems currently installed in public buildings of the Provincial administration.

Sustainable development is an important topic of urban research. The rational use of land resources is of great significance for urban development and is conducive to promoting regional governance and coordinated development. The purpose of this study was to construct an effective evaluation framework for urban land resources to maintain sustainable urban development. Taking the cities along the Jiangsu Section of the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal as the research object, this study constructed an evaluation system for the sustainable use of land resources including the dimensions of economic level, social development, and environmental resources. The statistical data for 2010, 2015, and 2020 were selected to comprehensively calculate and evaluate the level of sustainable use of land resources in the study area via the analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-entropy combined weight method, which combines the analytic hierarchy process and the entropy weight method. According to the research results, the sustainable use of land resources in the study area presented an overall upward trend from 2010 to 2015, and an overall downward trend from 2015 to 2020. Overall, the study area was in a critically sustainable stage, although the annual change rate of the level of sustainable use of land resources showed significant fluctuations and exhibited a spatial pattern of progressive increase from north to south. The cities in southern Jiangsu were in the initially sustainable and basically sustainable stages; those in central Jiangsu were in the critically sustainable and initially sustainable stages; and those in northern Jiangsu were in the unsustainable and critically sustainable stages. This study proposed a scientific and effective evaluation method for cities along the Grand Canal to explore the efficient, sustainable use of land resources in the future. The evaluation framework constructed on this basis can serve as an important reference for urban governance and is expected to guide the sustainable use and development of land resources for other cities of the same type.

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.

The quest for transparency spans countries, policymakers, NGOs, and industries.Transparency can be defined as disclosing to the public, in a timely and reliable manner, information that governments and/or corporations previously con-sidered confidential. Recent examples include the Carbon Disclosure Project,the Aarhus convention on access to environmental information, the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and its provisions on global genetically modified organism flows, and a wide array of financial information (e.g., in the G8 declaration of Lough Erne in 2013). Stemming from the “right to know,”advocates from NGOs and development organizations view transparency as a cure for corruption and a benefit for democratic accountability; transparency should lead to stakeholder empowerment and improve legitimacy, learning, investment certainty, and better governance. In this article I look at the efforts to establish financial transparency as a norm for the extractive sector. This sector is important because its activities are accompanied by a high level of corruption, especially in resource-rich developing countries. I show that those efforts are not enough and there is good evidence to demand more. I argue that such transparency norms should be extended to environmental pressures in order to facilitate progress on the circular economy and resource efficiency. My conclusions point at synergies between knowledge generation across financial and environmental information.