Elsevier

Ecological Economics

Volume 94, October 2013, Pages 19-27
Ecological Economics

Analysis
Material use and material efficiency in Latin America and the Caribbean

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2013.06.015Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Materials efficiency is deteriorating at both regional and individual country levels.

  • Even weak decoupling is extremely difficult for primary resource exporters.

  • Brazil provides an indication of the limited role biomass energy can play.

  • Socio-metabolic patterns in Latin America are largely driven by external demand.

Abstract

Different world regions have followed very different trajectories for natural resources use over the recent decades. Latin America has pursued a development path based largely on exports of primary resources. Adopting this path has characteristic environmental and social impacts. In this paper, we provide the first broad based estimate of material use and material efficiency for the region, beginning in 1970 and extending to the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008. The results show a region with rapidly growing primary materials consumption, which is simultaneously becoming less efficient at converting those resources into national income. Using an IPAT framework, we found that population growth and rising per-capita incomes made comparable contributions to growing material use, while technological change as reflected in material intensity, did not moderate consumption. Increasing materials intensity, observed for the region as a whole, is also observed for most individual countries. This contrasts with some other world regions, and implies that many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean will confront higher environmental pressures than expected when expanding their extractive industries to take advantage of new demand from other world regions, while simultaneously supplying the requirements for their own domestic industrial transformations and urbanization.

Introduction

The intent of this study is to provide new insights into material use and material efficiency patterns for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the drivers behind the observed patterns. To this end we constructed a new material flows data set which covers 22 countries within the region, for the period 1970 to 2008, using a standardized methodology based on that defined in Eurostat (2011). This considerably extends the number of countries and the length of time series for which such standardized data is now available, and is important in facilitating more direct comparison with other national, regional, and global studies(Gierlinger and Krausmann, 2012, Krausmann et al., 2009, Krausmann et al., 2011, Schandl and West, 2010). The extended and standardized data coverage has enabled us to provide analysis for the region as a whole, a major point of difference with previous studies which tended to focus on individual countries e.g. Chile (Giljum, 2004), Colombia (Perez Rincon, 2006, Vallejo et al., 2011), Ecuador (Vallejo, 2010), and Mexico (Gonzalez-Martinez and Schandl, 2008), or provide comparative analysis for a small group of countries e.g. 5 countries (Russi et al., 2008).

We also develop an account of the degree to which this world region's socio-metabolic profile is shaped by development abroad, highlighting how much of Latin America's economic development has been oriented towards increasing exports of primary resources. This is significant because previous studies have linked primary export driven patterns of development to economic structures characterized by underdevelopment and inequality (Bunker, 1984a, Giljum and Eisenmenger, 2004).

From the turn of the millennium the global economy entered a period characterized by rising and more volatile prices for natural resources—fossil fuels, metals, and food—(McKinsey Global Institute 2011), driven by the dynamic growth of large developing economies, especially China (UNEP, 2011). In such a rapidly changing context, governments increasingly require information systems that provide insight into the trends of natural resources production and use, to complement the set of economic indicators traditionally used for policy formation and planning. There is a need to broaden the compass employed in decision making (Bartelmus, 2003). Two main systems have been employed to organize such information, the System of Economic and Environmental Accounts (SEEA) of the United Nations (Bartelmus, 2007) and the material flows accounting (MFA) approach promoted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Haberl et al., 2004). The latter approach is relevant to this study. Both frameworks are compatible with the System of National Accounts. The SEEA accounts for changes in natural resource stocks, while the MFA accounts for flows between the economy and the environment. Usually, MFA data is easier to gather than data for a comprehensive SEEA but both frameworks are highly linked which has now been formally acknowledged by the updated version of SEEA (United Nations 2012).

Material flow accounting has been used to assemble information on the material requirements of national economies since the 1990s, largely implementing a basic program set out in the late 1960s by Robert Ayres and Allen Kneese (Fischer-Kowalski, 1998). This accounting approach provides a knowledge base essential to quantifying the relative resource efficiencies and socio-metabolic performance of different national economies, i.e. the amounts and characteristics of materials used in production and consumption. Such information has increasingly been regarded as policy relevant (National Research Council, 2004, National Research Council, 2008) especially with regard to the supply security of strategic materials such as certain metals.

More recently, the science and policy community has reached broad agreement on the methodologies to be employed in MFA (Fischer-Kowalski et al., 2011), and produced studies on global material use (Behrens et al., 2007, Krausmann et al., 2009, Schandl and Eisenmenger, 2006), and for a number of world regions e.g. Europe (Weisz et al., 2006) and Asia and the Pacific (Schandl and West, 2010).1 This research adds Latin America and the Caribbean as a third world region for which we now have material flow and resource productivity data, which can now be used to inform an integrated approach to economic and environmental policy making in this region.

Section snippets

Methods and Data Sources

The methods used to create the material flow account for Latin America and the Caribbean were largely the same as those used previously to assemble a similar database for the Asia Pacific region, as described in Schandl and West (2010). We provide here a summary and references to base data sources, along with detail on any significant departures from, or refinements of, the earlier methods. An expanded description is available in the technical annex to the online data set, available at //www.csiro.au/LatinAmericaCaribbeanResourceFlows

Trends in Material Use in Latin America and the Caribbean Placed in a Global Context

Fig. 1 shows that total domestic material consumption—of biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores and industrial and construction minerals combined—in Latin America and the Caribbean grew quite strongly when averaged over the period studied, from 2.1 billion tonnes in 1970 to 7.7 billion tonnes by 2008, a compounding growth rate of 3.4% p.a. Despite this growth, the region's share of global materials use is still relatively small, constituting only 11% of the global total in 2008, up from 8.5% in 1970.

General Discussion and Conclusions

Latin America and the Caribbean have been less efficient in creating income from its natural resources than the rest of the world, which is reflected in the regions material intensity being over one and a half times the global average. It may be argued, however, that the material intensity of the region is artificially high because a large fraction of the substance or service of value embodied in the primary materials produced is actually consumed outside of the region, while the associated

Acknowledgments

This research has been supported by the United Nations Environment Programme regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors wish to thank Graciela Metternich of the UNEP office for her support. We also thank Tom Measham and Luis Rodriguez for their feedback to a draft version and three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments.

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