Fridolin Krausmann

• Dr.
• Professor at BOKU University

Significance A large part of all primary materials extracted globally accumulates in stocks of manufactured capital, including in buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and equipment. These in-use stocks of materials provide important services for society and the economy and drive long-term demand for materials and energy. Configuration and quantity...

Economic and population growth result in increasing use of biophysical resources, including land and biomass. Human activities influence the biological productivity of land, altering material and energy flows in the biosphere. The human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) is an integrated socioecological indicator quantifying effects of...

The metabolism of human society is dynamic; it has undergone major changes during the course of human history, and it is currently in a transition process. Since the time of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, the amount of materials extracted and used by humans and the associated impact on the environment have grown by several orders of magnitude, and t...

It is increasingly recognized that the growing metabolism of society is approaching limitations both with respect to sources for resource inputs and sinks for waste and emission outflows. The circular economy (CE) is a simple, but convincing, strategy, which aims at reducing both input of virgin materials and output of wastes by closing economic an...

The size and structure of the socioeconomic metabolism are key for the planet’s sustainability. In this article, we provide a consistent assessment of the development of material flows through the global economy in the period 1900–2015 using material flow accounting in combination with results from dynamic stock-flow modelling. Based on this approa...

Global inequalities in resource use leave billions of people below decent living standards (DLS). Achieving universal access to DLS is estimated to only moderately increase energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. Implications for the necessary expansion of socioeconomic material stocks in buildings, infrastructure and machinery remain underexplore...

Accurate assessments of global primary material extraction, trade of primary materials and products, material use, waste, and emissions support the development of policies that facilitate the decoupling of economic activity, natural resource use, and related environmental impacts. Here, we quantify all crucial aspects of global and country‐by‐count...

Material stocks of infrastructure, buildings, and machinery are the biophysical basis of production and consumption. They are a crucial lever for resource efficiency and a sustainable circular economy. While material stock research has proliferated over the last years, most studies investigated specific materials or end‐uses, usually not embedded i...

Material stocks in long-lived products require >50% of annual global resource extraction for their construction and maintenance, and lock in energy and other dissipative resource-use through their technical and geospatial characteristics. Robust data on material stocks are thus fundamental to informing sustainable resource-use strategies. Yet, quan...

The global assemblage of human-created buildings, infrastructure, machinery and other artifacts has been called the `technosphere', and plays a major role in the present-day dynamics of the Earth system. It enables the rapid extraction and processing of materials from other spheres, combusts fossil fuels causing climate change, and transports mater...

Societies’ use of material resources is increasingly recognized as a key factor behind sustainability problems. The mass of materials used per capita and year differs substantially between countries. However, a limited range of variables (mostly per‐capita gross domestic product [GDP]) were analyzed to explain this variation. Spatial patterns of ci...

Emissions from agricultural activities constitute 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are hard to abate. Here, we present and analyze a consistent empirical assessment of global emissions from agricultural activities from 1910-2015. Agricultural emissions increased 3.5-fold from 1910-2015, from 1.9 to 6.7 GtCO2eq/yr. CH4 emissions, emissions...

Material stocks of infrastructure, buildings and machinery are the biophysical basis of production and consumption. They are a crucial lever for resource efficiency and a sustainable circular economy. While material stock research has proliferated over the last years, most studies investigated specific materials or end-uses, usually not embedded in...

Early energy analyses of agriculture revealed that behind higher labor and land productivity of industrial farming, there was a decrease in energy returns on energy (EROI) invested, in comparison to more traditional organic agricultural systems. Studies on recent trends show that efficiency gains in production and use of inputs have again somewhat...

Over the past 500 years, the transition to fossil fuels has been accompanied by sociopolitical upheaval, revolution , and counterrevolution in countries around the world. Previous research found that social revolutions occurred during energy transitions in a limited sample of 38 countries. This research expanded the investigation to examine the rel...

Vienna's biomass demand is large and nearly all biomass consumed in the city is produced in the regional and global hinterland. This raises the question, how the socioecological conditions at specific places somewhere in the world are impacted by urban consumption and how negative impacts can be addressed and mitigated by urban actors. Here we focu...

Socio-metabolic regimes and their respective sustainability problems are characterized by their specific patterns of natural resource use. During socio-metabolic transitions, these patterns change fundamentally. For example, hunter-gatherers depend on extracting edible biomass from largely unaltered ‘natural’ ecosystems. In contrast, agrarian socie...

Aim Land use is the most pervasive driver of biodiversity loss. Predicting its impact on species richness (SR) is often based on indicators of habitat loss. However, the degradation of habitats, especially through land‐use intensification, also affects species. Here, we evaluate whether an integrative metric of land‐use intensity, the human appropr...

Urbanization processes are accompanied by growing global challenges for food systems. Urban actors are increasingly striving to address these challenges through a focus on sustainable diets. However, transforming food systems towards more sustainable diets is challenging and it is unclear what the local scope of action might be. Co-production of kn...

Socio-metabolic research investigates societies’ extraction of raw materials and energy from the environment, their transformation into products, biophysical trade flows, the accumulation of societal material stocks (buildings, infrastructures, long-lived products), biophysical aspects of consumption, and releases of emissions and wastes to the env...

With ongoing global urbanization processes and consumption patterns increasingly recognized as key determinants of environmental change, a better understanding of the links between urban consumption and biodiversity loss is paramount. Here we quantify the global biodiversity footprint (BDF) of Vienna's (Austria) biomass consumption. We present a st...

The transition toward a circular bioeconomy requires policy directives based on comprehensive research on biomass in the context of region-specific economic, societal , and environmental realities. Bangladesh, a densely populated country with an agrarian economy morphing rapidly into an industrial one, needs a critical evaluation of its biomass met...

Decarbonizing transport is crucial for achieving climate targets, which is challenging because mobility is growing rapidly. Personal mobility is a key societal service and basic need, but currently not available to everyone with sufficient quality and quantity. The basis for mobility and accessibility of desired destinations is infrastructure, but...

Tackling the unfolding multiple environmental crisis requires a fundamental transformation of the global socio-economic metabolism of materials and energy flows to become more circular, efficient, carbon-neutral and compatible with Planetary Boundaries. Material stocks in the built environment, e.g. infrastructures, buildings and machinery, form th...

The provision of food is fundamental for society, but it is also a major driver of environmental change. Cities are important consumers of food, harboring more than half of the global population, a share that is expected to grow in the coming decades. Here we investigate the urban food system of Vienna, a large central European city. We quantify th...

Transforming and expanding the electricity sector are key for climate change mitigation and alleviation of energy poverty. Future energy systems based on renewable energy sources may reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but could require more materials during construction. We assess this trade-off by quantifying the requirements of the main bulk m...

The article investigates the roles of the European Recovery Program (ERP) and the Organization for European Economic CoOperation (OEEC) in pushing France towards a pathway of petroleum dependency. The study is based on the energy transition and the Deep Transition frameworks, notably the analysis of specific collective actors. The analysis elaborat...

International datasets on economy-wide material flows currently fail to comprehensively cover the quantitatively most important materials and countries, to provide centennial coverage and to differentiate between processing stages. These data gaps hamper research and policy on resource use. Herein, we present and document the data processing and co...

Land-use has transformed ecosystems over three quarters of the terrestrial surface, with massive repercussions on biodiversity. Land-use intensity is known to contribute to the effects of land-use on biodiversity, but the magnitude of this contribution remains uncertain. Here, we use a modified countryside species-area model to compute a global acc...

Land-use has transformed ecosystems over three quarters of the terrestrial surface, with massive repercussions on biodiversity. Land-use intensity is known to contribute to the effects of land-use on biodiversity, but the magnitude of this contribution remains uncertain. Here, we use a modified countryside species-area model to compute a global acc...

Global material stocks of infrastructure, buildings, machinery and consumer products are growing rapidly, driving emissions and other environmental impacts during materials extraction, processing, construction and waste. However, international data on economy-wide material flows (ew-MFA) currently is limited to national extraction, trade and consum...

Material stocks in infrastructure, buildings and machinery shape current and future resource use and emissions. Analyses of specific countries and selected materials suggest that material stocks might saturate, which would be important for a more sustainable social metabolism. However, it is unclear to what extent the evidence holds for a wider ran...

Global biomass trade has risen sharply in recent decades. This development was accompanied by increasing concerns about adverse environmental impacts in exporting countries. In Austria, strong preference for food and bioenergy from domestic sources is prevalent, while especially biomass imports for energy are met with scepticism. We here investigat...

Electricity infrastructures are key for the provision of crucial energy services and economic prosperity. We investigate the current state and historical development of the global power sector from a “stock-flow-service nexus” (SFS-nexus) perspective. The SFS-nexus emphasizes the interrelations and dependencies between social metabolism (i.e. stock...

Achieving a global forest transition, that is a shift from deforestation to reforestation, is important for climate-change mitigation. Forest transitions are enabled by socioecological processes, including land displacement, agricultural intensification and woodfuel substitution for other energy, but their respective contributions remain poorly und...

Land use has greatly transformed Earth’s surface. While spatial reconstructions of how the extent of land cover and land‐use types have changed during the last century are available, much less information exists about changes in land‐use intensity. In particular, global reconstructions that consistently cover land‐use intensity across land‐use type...

Land-use activities are increasingly globalized and industrialized. While this contributes to a reduction of pressure on domestic ecosystems in some regions, spillover effects from these processes represent potential obstacles for global sustainable land-use. This contribution scrutinizes the complex global resource nexus of national land-use inten...

Globally, more than half of all extracted materials are used to build and maintain material stocks. The United States of America (USA) is one of the largest global consumers of these materials. To assess the role of stocks for long-term material use in an affluent industrialized economy, we present an analysis of material use and stock accumulation...

Sustainable resource use calls for substantial changes to existing infrastructures, which lock societies into current resource use patterns. Urban mobility is a case in point: existing material stocks of infrastructure and vehicles require large amounts of materials and energy for maintenance and operation in order to provide mobility services, the...

Article can be downloaded via share link at: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1bzdC3HVLKiByH Energy and materials support food production, maintain and expand material stocks (e.g. buildings and roads) and provide services. In this paper, an exergy-based approach is used to provide an integrated perspective on the evolution of societal resource fl...

The accelerating rise in global resource use is inextricably linked to extractive expansion, that is, to the encroachment on or even destruction of habitats and livelihoods and to the disturbance of major biogeochemical cycles. This growth trajectory, however, is considered unavoidable or even necessary to overcome poverty and to sustain the growth...

The circular economy is a rapidly emerging concept promoted as transformative approach towards sustainable resource use within Planetary Boundaries. It is gaining traction with policymakers, industry and academia worldwide. It promises to slow, narrow and close socioeconomic material cycles by retaining value as long as possible, thereby minimizing...

This is a 40 seconds long teaser video showing sankey diagrams of the global metabolism including circular flows for 115 years in 5 year steps.

This is the uncertainty assessment for the article "Spaceship earth’s odyssey to a circular economy: A century long perspective" in Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 2020

These are the data for the article "Spaceship earth’s odyssey to a circular economy: A century long perspective" in Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 2020. It covers DE for the main material categories (fossil materials, biomass, metals, non-metallic minerals), the circular and non-circular flows and the data for the uncertainty analysis.

Video on the content of the article "Spaceship earth's odyssey to a circular economy - a century long perspective" showing with Sankey-diagrams how global material and energy flows increase since 1900

Material stocks are the physical basis of production and consumption and shape the dynamics of resource use and socioeconomic outcomes. We present an inflow-driven, long-term estimation of material stocks for the United Kingdom, covering 12 major materials from 1800 to 2017. We find the trajectory of the UK's stocks characterized by slow increases...

Management of the non-renewable resource phosphorus (P) is critical to agricultural sustainability. The global P cycle is currently disturbed beyond planetary boundaries, mostly due to large excess P use in the agriculture of industrialized countries, while P is lacking in the Global South. The trajectories of P management and their effects on futu...

As long as economic growth is a major political goal, decoupling growth from resource use and emissions is a prerequisite for a sustainable net-zero emissions future. However, empirical evidence for absolute decoupling, i.e., decreasing resource use and emissions at the required scale despite continued economic growth, is scarce and scattered acros...

Strategies toward ambitious climate targets usually rely on the concept of “decoupling”; that is, they aim at promoting economic growth while reducing the use of natural resources and GHG emissions. GDP growth coinciding with absolute reductions in emissions or resource use is denoted as “absolute decoupling”, as opposed to “relative decoupling”, w...

Drastic reductions of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions are required to meet the goal of the 2015 Paris climate accord to limit global warming to 1.5-2.0 °C over pre-industrial levels. We introduce the material stock-flow framework as a novel way to develop scenarios for future GHG emissions using methods from social metabolism research. The basic ass...

Despite considerable advancements over the last couple of years, research on the Anthropocene still faces at least two challenges: (1) integrating different approaches from natural, social and cultural sciences, and (2) clarifying the political relevance of this concept. To address these challenges, we propose an interdisciplinary approach from Soc...

The concept of food regimes has become a prominent theory in political economy. We here provide socio-ecological underpinning of the food regimes theory and thereby connect it closer to an ecological economics perspective. We quantify physical trade with main agricultural commodities between world regions from the mid-19th century to 2016 and ask h...

High levels of resource consumption cause detrimental environmental change. Very low consumption may fail to meet basic needs. A major challenge for a sustainability transformation is to reduce inequalities and achieve a globally sustainable level of resource flows. By providing access to resources beyond national boundaries, trade could either lea...

Progress towards the SDGs requires far-reaching changes in societies’ use of biophysical resources such as materials, energy or land. Current socio-metabolic research (SMR) traces flows of energy, materials or substances to capture resource use. SMR is also useful to analyze interdependencies (synergies or tradeoffs) between attempts at reaching sp...

Recent high-level agreements such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals aim at mitigating climate change, ecological degradation and biodiversity loss while pursuing social goals such as reducing hunger or poverty. Systemic approaches bridging natural and social sciences are required to support these agendas. The surging huma...

The role of trade in global environmental change is receiving increasing attention and there is a lively debate about Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE). Little is known, however, about the role of colonial legacy for the evolution of physical trade patterns. This study provides empirical evidence on the basis of a systematic evaluation of global...

Supporting Information S1: This supporting information provides details of all assumptions, primary and secondary data sources, and various calculation factors referred to in the article.

Supplementary Data S2: This supporting information provides details of all data referred to in the article, along with a complete system description. Color coding in this SI file is as follows: green = data as used in figures; yellow = final circular economy system description; blue = calculation steps; red = raw data files as downloaded.

Assessing progress towards environmental sustainability requires a robust and systematic knowledge base. Economy-wide material flow accounting (ew-MFA) is an established method to monitor resource use across scales and its headline indicators are widely used in policy. However, ew-MFA is currently limited by its empirical focus on annual flows of m...

The concept of a circular economy (CE) is gaining increasing attention from policy makers, industry, and academia. There is a rapidly evolving debate on definitions, limitations, the contribution to a wider sustainability agenda, and a need for indicators to assess the effectiveness of circular economy measures at larger scales. Herein, we present...

The transition from a traditional agrarian to a fossil fuel based energy regime began before the industrial revolution and is still ongoing. This paper explores the relation of this transition process and social revolutions. Using statistical analysis, we find that at the very beginning of countries' energy transition, a critical phase can be ident...

Analyses of energy efficiency in biomass production offer important insights in the context of sustainable land management and biomass production. However, much of the previous research on the topic has focused on the energy efficiency of either food or energy provision. Only recently, comprehensive analyses at the total agroecosystem level have be...

Agroecosystems are facing a global challenge amidst a socioecological transition that places them in a dilemma between increasing land-use intensity to meet the growing demand of food, feed, fibres and fuels, while avoiding the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. We applied an intermediate disturbance-complexity approach to the land-use ch...

We investigate agroecosystem energy flows in two Upper Austrian regions, the lowland region Sankt Florian and the prealpine region Grünburg, at five time points between 1830 and 2000. Energetic agroecosystem productivity (energy contents of crops, livestock products, and wood per unit area) is compared to different types of energy inputs, i.e., ext...

Absolute reductions in global resource use are a precondition for sustainability. Yet, many countries must increase their resource use in the process of economic development and industrialization. In this dilemma, efficient contraction and convergence is viewed as a potential solution: Per capita resource use must internationally converge below the...

The growing extraction of natural resources and the waste and emissions resulting from their use are directly or indirectly responsible for humanity approaching or even surpassing critical planetary boundaries. A sound knowledge base of society’s metabolism, i.e., the physical exchange processes between society and its natural environment and the p...

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the potential for a more circular economy and the application of material flow accounting to increase knowledge on materials accumulating in in-use stocks. This study assesses the dynamics of stocks and flows related to road networks, which are a significant destination for recycled construction and demo...

Late 18th century agriculture was under social and economic pressures, emanating from unprecedented population growth and establishing world markets. Farmers met these challenges successfully and largely without external energy subsidies and mineral fertilizers. Our research asks (1) if and how performance gains were achieved by improving tradition...

Dematerialization at the national level occurs almost exclusively during periods of economic recession or low growth. While recession is not a sustainable strategy to curb environmental impact, such periods may offer important insights on the possibilities of reducing material use. Economic recession research has focused on the interactions between...

The international industrial ecology (IE) research community and United Nations (UN) Environment have, for the first time, agreed on an authoritative and comprehensive data set for global material extraction and trade covering 40 years of global economic activity and natural resource use. This new data set is becoming the standard information sourc...

Fundamental changes in the societal use of biophysical resources are required for a sustainability transformation. Current socioeconomic metabolism research traces flows of energy, materials or substances to capture resource use: input of raw materials or energy, their fate in production and consumption, and the discharge of wastes and emissions. T...