Martin Bruckner

Martin Bruckner
Vienna University of Economics and Business | WU

Dr.

About

71
Publications
32,046
Reads
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4,127
Citations
Introduction
I currently focus on the development and application of physical multi-regional supply-use tables and input-output models, particularly in the area of agricultural and food products, energy, and forestry products, in order to track product and resource flows across global transport and supply chains, calculating footprint indicators and investigating distant relations between human and ecological systems across countries and sectors.
Additional affiliations
January 2023 - September 2024
ETH Zurich
Position
  • Senior Researcher
October 2013 - December 2022
Vienna University of Economics and Business
Position
  • Research Associate
February 2008 - September 2013
Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI)
Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI)
Education
March 2013 - October 2017
BOKU University
Field of study
  • Land use and global change
October 2005 - October 2010
Alpen-Adria Universität
Field of study
  • Social and Human Ecology
October 2001 - June 2005
TU Wien
Field of study
  • Economics and Computer Science

Publications

Publications (71)
Article
Full-text available
Harvested biomass is linked to final consumption by networks of processes and actors that convert and distribute food and non-food goods. Achieving a sustainable resource metabolism of the economy is an overarching challenge which manifests itself in a number of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Modelling the physical dimensions of biomass conv...
Article
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A dietary shift from animal-based foods to plant-based foods in high-income nations could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from direct agricultural production and increase carbon sequestration if resulting spared land was restored to its antecedent natural vegetation. We estimate this double effect by simulating the adoption of the EAT–Lancet planet...
Article
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Food systems are the largest users of land and water resources worldwide. Using a multi-model approach to track food through the global trade network, we calculated the land footprint (LF) and water footprint (WF) of food consumption in the European Union (EU). We estimated the EU LF as 140–222 Mha yr⁻¹ and WF as 569–918 km³ yr⁻¹. These amounts are...
Article
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Dependencies in the global food production network can lead to shortages in numerous regions, as demonstrated by the impacts of the Russia–Ukraine conflict on global food supplies. Here we reveal the losses of 125 food products after a localized shock to agricultural production in 192 countries and territories using a multilayer network model of tr...
Article
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Key Messages: • Substituting fossil with bio-based resources in the EU involves sustainability tradeoffs at the global scale and requires appropriate safeguards. • Safeguarding food prices and the conservation of natural ecosystems must be a priority • Despite progress, data gaps and methodological challenges have to be overcome to inform the de...
Article
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Biomass was the principal energy source in preindustrial societies; their agriculture provided more energy than it required. Thus, the energy return on energy investment (EROEI) needed to be >1. Recent studies have indicated that this may not be the case for modern industrialized agrifood systems (AFSs). Although the green revolution radically impr...
Preprint
Full-text available
A large-scale food system transformation is essential in mitigating a host of environmental crises, including climate change. Dietary shifts, particularly a reduction in animal-sourced foods (ASFs) in high-income countries, are a key pillar. These shifts risk stranding substantial ASF-related assets. ASF-focussed assets represent 78% of EU27+UK fix...
Preprint
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Global food production and trade networks are highly dynamic, especially in response to shortages when countries adjust their supply strategies. In this study, we examine adjustments across 123 agri-food products from 192 countries resulting in 23616 individual scenarios of food shortage, and calibrate a multi-layer network model to understand the...
Article
Scientists around the world have been studying how the food we eat impacts the planet. The demand for animal products, especially meat and milk, creates a lot of greenhouse gas emissions that heat our world. In rich countries, people often eat more animal-based foods than needed, which can be bad for people’s health. So, eating more plants can redu...
Chapter
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Zusammenfassung Die Technische Zusammenfassung des APCC-Sonderberichts ″Landnutzung und Klimawandel in Österreich″ umfasst die Kernbotschaften der Kapitel 1–9. In ihr sind die Hauptaussagen zu den sozioökonomischen und klimatischen Treibern der Landnutzungsänderungen, zu den Auswirkungen von Landnutzung und -bewirtschaftung auf den Klimawandel, zu...
Chapter
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Zusammenfassung Kap. 2 beschreibt die Auswirkungen der Landnutzung und -bewirtschaftung auf den Klimawandel und bezieht nicht bewirtschaftete Ökosysteme explizit mit ein. Das zentrale Instrument für die Bilanzierung der Auswirkungen der österreichischen Landnutzung auf den Klimawandel ist die Treibhausgasinventur (THG-Inventur), die jährlich basier...
Preprint
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The war in Ukraine highlighted the vulnerability of the global food supply system. Due to dependencies in the global food-production network, the local loss of one crop can lead to shortages in other countries and affect other products made from it. Previous studies treat products in isolation and do not account for product conversion during produc...
Preprint
Full-text available
Greenhouse gas emissions embodied in international trade have risen sharply over the last few decades because of the globalization of economies and countries’ productive specialization. We have built a model able to trace all agro-food emissions along global value chains for 1986–2013. The results show that while the domestic fraction of food emiss...
Article
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Key biodiversity areas (KBAs) are critical regions for preserving global biodiversity. KBAs are identified by their importance to biodiversity rather than their legal status. As such, KBAs are often under pressure from human activities. KBAs can encompass many different land-use types (e.g., cropland, pastures) and land-use intensities. Here, we co...
Article
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Human land use is the main driver of terrestrial biodiversity loss. It has been argued that producers and consumers have a shared responsibility for biodiversity loss because this land use is directly and indirectly driven by the local and global demand for products. Such responsibility sharing would be an important step for global biodiversity coo...
Article
Lacking systematic supply-use information of agricultural biomass and food products within China makes the existing provincial environmental pressure assessments (e.g., water consumption) either not detailed enough (e.g., by the input-output table-based approach) or not comprehensive enough (e.g., by the process-based approach). This study develops...
Article
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...
Article
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To feed future populations on ever-scarcer natural resources, policy initiatives aim to decrease resource footprints of food consumption. While adopting healthier diets has shown great potential to reduce footprints, current political initiatives primarily address strategies to reduce food waste, with the target of halving food waste at retail and...
Article
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Input-output analysis is one of the central methodological pillars of industrial ecology. However, the literature that discusses different structures of environmental extensions (EEs), i.e. the scope of physical flows and their attribution to sectors in the monetary input-output table (MIOT), remains fragmented. This paper investigates the conceptu...
Article
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Bioeconomy strategies in high income societies focus at replacing finite, fossil resources by renewable, biological resources to reconcile macro-economic concerns with climate constraints. However, the current bioeconomy is associated with critical levels of environmental degradation. As a potential increase in biological resource use may further t...
Article
Land resources are important for China’s rapid economic development, especially for food and construction. China’s land resources are under tremendous pressures, and therefore land use is increasingly displaced to other parts of the world. This study analyses the evolution and driving forces of China’s land consumption from 1995 to 2015. The main r...
Article
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We define a family of environmental footprints. • We identify overlaps between different footprints. • We analyse how they relate to the nine planetary boundaries. • We discuss the relation with SDGs, WEFE nexus and ecosystem services. • We argue that the footprint family is a flexible framework. Editor: Damia Barcelo The number of publications on...
Article
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The number of publications on environmental footprint indicators has been growing rapidly, but with limited efforts to integrate different footprints into a coherent framework. Such integration is important for comprehensive understanding of environmental issues, policy formulation and assessment of trade-offs between different environmental concer...
Article
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A rapidly growing share of global agricultural areas is devoted to the production of biomass for non-food purposes. The expanding non-food bioeconomy can have far-reaching social and ecological implications; yet, the non-food sector has attained little attention in land footprint studies. This paper provides the first assessment of the global cropl...
Article
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Biodiversity and ecosystem service losses driven by land-use change are expected to intensify as a growing and more affluent global population requires more agricultural and forestry products, and teleconnections in the global economy lead to increasing remote environmental responsibility. By combining global biophysical and economic models, we sho...
Article
Understanding teleconnections of regional consumption patterns and global land use supports policy making towards achieving sustainable land use. We present an innovative globally consistent hybrid land-flow accounting method to track biomass flows and embodied land along global supply chains. It uses the large FAOSTAT database, which is, for non-f...
Article
A new approach to allocate environmental responsibility, the ‘value added-based responsibility’ allocation, is presented in this article. This metric allocates total environmental pressures occurring along an international supply chain to the participating sectors and countries according to the share of value added they generate within that specifi...
Article
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An increasing number of countries develop bio-economy strategies to promote a stronger reliance on the efficient use of renewable biological resources in order to meet multiple sustainability challenges. At the global scale, however, bio-economies are diverse, with sectors such as agriculture, forestry, energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, as well a...
Conference Paper
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Green growth strategies and bioeconomic technological innovation affect global demand and supply of agricultural and forestry-based commodities. What trade-mediated impacts has this fledging transformation on land-use change at ecologically sensitive tropical forest margins? Standard global trade models only provide impact assessments at aggregate...
Conference Paper
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Despite the current drop in price, many fossil fuel resources are becoming increasingly scarce and their consumption is associated with climate change and harmful effects on ecosystems and human health. At the same time, population growth and corresponding pressures on natural resources have risen beyond safe ecological limits. In response to these...
Article
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Global multiregional input-output databases (GMRIOs) became the standard tool for tracking environmental impacts through global supply chains. To date, several GMRIOs are available, but the numerical results differ. This paper considers how GMRIOs can be made more robust and authoritative. We show that GMRIOs need detail in environmentally relevant...
Article
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Environmentally extended multiregional input-output (EE MRIO) tables have emerged as a key framework to provide a comprehensive description of the global economy and analyze its effects on the environment. Of the available EE MRIO databases, EXIOBASE stands out as a database compatible with the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) wit...
Chapter
Today’s most pressing environmental problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, land cover conversion, etc. are caused by the overall growth of production and consumption. For a methodologically sound and comprehensive measurement of societal resource use and its environmental, economic and social impacts as well as for monitoring progress...
Conference Paper
Demand for and technological innovation towards advanced bio-based products add a new dimension to the food vs. fuel debate. Both novel biomass applications and substitution among existing uses at global scale can result in changes in cropland area in unexpected regions. Based on the potential of Input-Output (IO) to estimate Land Use Change (LUC)...
Chapter
Many of today?s most urgent environmental problems are related to the increasing volumes of worldwide production and consumption and the associated use of natural resources. Solid indicators to measure different dimensions of anthropogenic resource use are essential for designing appropriate policy measures for a sustainable management of these res...
Technical Report
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In a previous report for the OECD Environment Directorate (Giljum et al., 2015), the state of scientific knowledge about the robustness and reliability of demand-based indicators of material flows to guide the OECD’s engagement in this domain was assessed. This report builds upon the results and recommendations of the previous study. The first obje...
Article
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Recent empirical assessments revealed that footprint indicators calculated with various multi-regional input–output (MRIO) databases deliver deviating results. In this paper, we propose a new method, called structural production layer decomposition (SPLD), which complements existing structural decomposition approaches. SPLD enables differentiating...
Article
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Available online xxxx Understanding the environmental implications of consumption and production depends on appropriate monitoring tools. Material flow accounting (MFA) is a method to monitor natural resource use by countries and has been widely used in research and policy. However, the increasing globalization requires the consideration of 'embodi...
Article
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In the context of the transformation toward a “green economy,” issues related to natural resource use have rapidly increased in importance in European and international policy debates. The large number of studies applying economy-wide material flow analysis so far mostly produced aggregated national indicators, making the results difficult to conne...
Article
Effective implementation of resource policies requires consistent and robust indicators. An increasing number of national and international strategies focussing on resource efficiency as a means for reaching a “green economy” call for such indicators. As supply chains of goods and services are increasingly organised on the global level, comprehensi...
Article
Buying the same product at the neighborhood store or at a shopping mall implies different carbon emissions. This paper quantifies carbon impacts of consumer choices of retail channel and shop location (where to buy), extending footprint assessments of product choices (what to buy). Carbon emissions of shopping situations are shown in the current si...
Chapter
In diesem Beitrag wird anhand eines Szenarios den Fragen nachgegangen, in welchem Ausmaß Metalle für eine globale Energiewende bis 2050 benötigt werden und inwieweit dieser Ausbau von Erneuerbare-Energie-Technologien mit Verknappungen bei einzelnen Metallen verbunden sein könnte. Als besonders problematische Technologieoptionen zeichnen sich in die...
Article
Consumption-based material footprints calculated with multi-regional input–output (mrIO) analysis are influenced by the sectoral, spatial and material aggregations used in the mrIO tables, and lack of disaggregation can be a source of uncertainty. This study investigated the effect of the resolution of mrIO databases on consumption-based material f...
Article
In an increasingly globalized world with more and more distributed international supply chains, sustainability studies and policies need to consider socioeconomic and environmental interactions between distant places. Studies of the global biomass metabolism investigate physical flows between and within nature and human systems, thus providing a us...
Article
Material flow-based indicators play an important role in measuring green and resource-efficient growth. This article examines the global flows of materials and the amounts of materials directly and indirectly necessary to satisfy domestic final demand in different countries world-wide. We calculate the indicator Raw Material Consumption (RMC), also...
Technical Report
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In this report the Eco-Innovation Observatory has looked at how eco-innovation can lead to and create pervasive change. It argues that if eco-innovation is based on partnerships of different stakeholders working together, it can play a crucial role in the transition to a green and competitive economy. Eco-innovation can take the form of improved pr...
Article
Production in emerging economies, such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Argentina (BRICSA), increased substantially over the past two decades. This is, on the one hand, due to growing domestic demand within these countries, and, on the other hand, due to a deepened international division of work. Global trade linkages have become...
Article
Production and consumption activities in industrialized countries are increasingly dependent on material and energy resources from other world regions and imply significant economic and environmental consequences in other regions around the world. The substitution of domestic material extraction and processing through imports is also shifting envir...
Article
The Global Resource Accounting Model (GRAM) is an environmentally-extended multi-regional input–output model, covering 48 sectors in 53 countries and two regions. Next to CO2 emissions, GRAM also includes different resource categories. Using GRAM, we are able to estimate the amount of carbon emissions embodied in international trade for each year b...
Chapter
Europe's economy is to a significant and growing degree dependent on imports of natural resources from other world regions. While the overall level of resource use in Europe has stabilized in the past 20 years, a shift of the environmental burden through international trade can be observed, with growing physical imports and associated indirect mate...
Article
The fragile ecological systems of the Arctic are in danger. In mining and smelting, large amounts of soot, nitrous gasses, and sulphur dioxide are released. Through the food chain, toxic organic pollutants and heavy metals build up in the organisms of animals and people. Climate change is putting additional stress on ecological systems. Invasive sp...
Article
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This paper compares the Kyoto Protocol’s production-based accounting method to calculate a country’s CO2 emissions with a consumption-based accounting method that measures the carbon embodied in goods in the country where they are consumed. The choice between the two accounting principles implies an inherent judgment on whether the producer or the...
Article
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Gemeinden, die ihren Beitrag fur ein nachhaltiges Energiesystem leisten wollen, mussen ihre Optionen anhand einer Reihe von Nachhaltigkeitskriterien abwagen. Eine partizipative Bewertung von Energieszenarien kann als innovatives Instrument dazu beitragen.
Article
Full-text available
Gemeinden, die ihren Beitrag für ein nachhaltiges Energiesystem leisten wollen, müssen ihre Optionen anhand einer Reihe von Nachhaltigkeitskriterien abwägen. Eine partizipative Bewertung von Energieszenarien kann als innovatives Instrument dazu beitragen.
Article
Full-text available
spru *NachwuchsforscherInnen (LB: geb. 9.7.1975, Unterbrechung der Laufbahn wegen Mutterschaft, MB: geb. 11.10.1981) Kurzfassung: Gemeinden, die danach trachten ihren Beitrag zu nachhaltigerer Entwicklung zu leisten, stehen vor der Herausforderung, Optionen für zukünftige Energiesysteme unter Berücksichtigung einer Reihe von Nachhaltigkeitskriterie...

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