GLOMETRA - The global metabolic transition

The size of the physical economy has multiplied during industrialization. Socioeconomic material and energy flows have reached a volume that interferes with global biogeochemical cycles and increased the scope and complexity of environmental problems. The concept of social metabolism recognizes that all economic activity is based on a throughput of materials and energy and it relates, conceptually and methodologically, to the (monetary) system of national accounts and to ecosystem analysis. It allows the systematic treatment of sustainability problems occurring both at the input side (related to resource provision) and at the output side (related to wastes and emissions) of socio-economic systems and has emerged as a key concept in sustainability science. This project takes a systemic and long term view upon global social metabolism and its transformations. It will provide a country-by-country comprehensive global database for socio-economic material and energy flows for at least ten points in time during the last 100 years. It will analyse temporal and cross country patterns of social metabolism and their underlying bio-geographical and socioeconomic drivers such as population and economic growth. Special attention will be given to the interrelation of energy use (and available energy services) and material flows. The project will establish a typology of countries with respect to their metabolic characteristics (metabolic profiles). Based on time series data, it will investigate metabolic transitions and identify differences in development pathways and trajectories, thus exploring potentials and limitations for shifts towards a more sustainable industrial metabolism. This research will allow to draw conclusions on the characteristics of ongoing transition processes and the role of globalisation for changing patterns of resource use. It will show if newly industrializing countries are following the (resource intensive) path of industrialization observed historically or if also other, more sustainable paths are emerging. This provides important background information for the development of policies for sustainable resource use and the restructuring of industrial metabolism required for the protection of the climate system.

Human society is in the midst of global metabolic transition. During the last 150 years of industrial development global extraction and use of materials and energy has increased 15-20 fold; rather than slowing down, growth of resource use has accelerated over time. The GLOMETRA project has compiled a database for global resource use in the last centuries and analysed global patterns of material and energy use at the national scale and the drivers behind the observed development. According to our findings, at the beginning of the 20th century humanity uses around 70 Gt (1Gt = 109 tonnes) of material each year; less than 30% of this global mass flow is renewable biomass. The amount of fossil and mineral materials has increased from 0.5 to 50 Gt/y. Most of the materials we use are accumulated in stocks of buildings, infrastructures and durable goods and create long term legacies for society; only a fraction of 50% is consumed and disposed within a year, mostly biomass and fossil energy carriers providing humans with food, feed for livestock and fuel for mobility, housing and industry. For most of the observed period, growth in material and energy use was largely driven by the economic development in the industrial world, a group of countries which consumed more than 80% of all extracted mineral and fossil materials and 50% of all biomass in 1950. While resource use in the industrial world seems to stabilize at a high level, now the newly emerging economies in Asia begin to drive global resource use: In the last decade growth has accelerated and material and energy use are currently growing faster than the global economy. The only region with low and declining resource use (per capita) was and is Sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, growth of global metabolism is driven by income and population. Although the amount of materials and energy required to produce one unit of GDP is constantly declining, these gains in efficiency have never led to a lasting reduction in resource consumption.With the enormous growth of social metabolism since the beginning of industrialisation, human influence on the biosphere reached such a size that it seems justified to even speak of a new geological era, the Anthropocene. A global convergence in metabolic rates at the current metabolic profile of industrial countries paired with the expected growth in global population would lead to a doubling or even tripling of global resource use. These resources are most likely neither available nor can we expect the global ecosystem to have the capacities to absorb the corresponding wastes and emission. From this it is obvious that the scale of socio-economic metabolism cannot continue to grow as in the past and humanity has to find ways to return to a safe operating space within planetary boundaries. This will require a significant reduction of resource use in the industrial world and ways to obtain wealth and quality of life in the emerging economies without emulating the metabolic profile of the old industrial core. A sustainability transition may well require similarly fundamental changes in society as the historical agrarian-industrial transition.