Accounting and Modelling Global Resource Use

Monitoring the transition of modern societies towards a path of sustainable development requires comprehensive and consistent information on the relations between socio-economic activities and resulting environmental consequences. In the past 15 years, several approaches have been developed providing this information in biophysical terms (see, for example, Daniels and Moore 2002 for an overview). These methods of physical accounting are applied to quantify “ societal metabolism ” (Fischer-Kowalski 1998) and to measure the use of “ environmental space ” (Op-schoor 1995) by human activities. Within the system of physical accounts on the national level (for a classification see United Nations 2003), material flow accounting and analysis (MFA) and land use accounting are regarded as appropriate tools to provide a comprehensive picture of environmental pressures induced by and interlinked with the production and consumption of a country.

In the European Union (EU), a large number of policy documents address high levels of resource use and production of huge amounts of waste and emissions as one major obstacle for the realisation of an environmentally sustainable development in industrialised countries. The sustainable management of natural resources, in order to keep anthropogenic environmental pressures within the limits of Earth 's carrying capacity, is highlighted as one central objective for the implementation of a sustainability strategy within Europe (for example, European Commission 2001a). De-coupling (or de-linking) economic growth from the use of natural resources and environmental degradation is defined as the core strategy to achieve sustainable levels of resource use; raising the resource productivity of production and consumption activities should help producing the same or even more products with less resource input and less waste (European Commission 2003).