REMASS: Resilience and Malleability of Social Metabolism

The rapidly growing use of natural resources contributes to global heating, while current crises such as wars, pandemics or climate extremes jeopardize global supply chains. But how do such crises influence resource use, sustainability, inequality and societal wellbeing? The central aim of REMASS is to analyze the resilience of resource use to such crises. At the same time, the project will study how these crises affect options for transformations to more sustainable and fair patterns of resource use. The concept of social metabolism is central for this project. Societies extract materials and energy from their environment that are required for production and consumption processes. REMASS will establish a global database with unprecedented detail to trace flows of resources through global supply chains, from resource extraction to accumulation of materials in buildings, infrastructures and other products to wastes and emissions or recovery of resources through recycling. REMASS will study how different disruptions during crises affect transformations towards sustainability. Highly resolved social metabolism data will be combined with big data approaches from complexity science to quantify the resilience of metabolism during supply chain disruptions. Social metabolism data will be combined with data describing trade and production networks representing socioeconomic interrelations within social and economic systems. The resulting models can be used to study the resilience of economies and societies to the above-mentioned disruptions and crises, as well as their impacts on ongoing transformation processes. Another key issue is how resource use changes over space, time and different social groups, in particular during crises, and how that in turn affects inequality and social wellbeing. REMASS will create a solid basis to identify effective reactions to disruptions that can be used as levers to promote fair and sustainable patterns of production, trade, and consumption. Possibilities to transform patterns of resource use towards more sustainability and social wellbeing will be studied for three important provisioning systems: nutrition, housing and mobility. This research will not only address resource flows, material stocks, and their ecological impacts, but also inequalities, core actors, interests, decision processes and power relations. The malleability of provisioning systems during crises and disruptions hinges primarily on these factors. Six case studies will be undertaken at central places in both the Global North and the Global South to understand how provisioning systems can be transformed towards more equal and sustainable patterns, and how disruptions in supply chains affect these transformation processes and inequalities.