 Hello everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our cities, or in other words, their resource use and pollution emission flows, and how to reduce them in a systemic, socially just, and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities, and today we're going to try to explore the relationship between how, on the one hand, we use resource uses and we emit pollution, and how they are associated with certain infrastructures and stocks. That's on the one hand, and on the other, what is the service that they provide to society? So what we're really trying to understand here is when we think about the future and what is needed in order to operate our societies, what is the minimum amount of flows and stocks that we need to do so. To talk about this topic, I have a colleague researcher, Dominic Widenhofer. Dominic is a senior scientist in the Institute of Social Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, BOKU, and his work has focused on developing techniques to bear account for societal uses of materials and energy. And it's linked in the ongoing accumulation of manufactured capital. So we're going to investigate together the role of consumption, also the link between resource use and emissions across different end-users. We might touch upon as well inequality, affluence, and also the options of agency. Just before kicking off this episode, I will encourage you to continue this discussion after we finish this conversation online. So don't hesitate to drop an email to Dominic to tell him what you thought about the episode. With all that being said, Dominic, welcome to the podcast. Well, thank you very much for having me here. I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Yeah, we're in Vienna right now. It's actually great to be at the end of this international society, International Society of Industrial Ecology, the Social Ecological Metabolism Conference, and we've met over many years through these conferences. Perhaps you can explain a bit how you work in these topics, what do you do, and what is SEM, perhaps. OK, wonderful. Yes, so basically for me, the entry point into all of this research was my interest to understand what are the structural conditions that we need to have a sustainable life. So what are the options and what are the ways to make sustainable practices the easier way to live? Because right now it's the opposite way. So if we think about mobility, it's often easier to take the car, which is about infrastructures, which is about public transport systems, which is about the rules and the regulations we have around it. So these are the topics that really got me interested. And when starting my research, I realized that it's really important to see the complexity, as we call it, the metabolism, or how social systems, how societies are connected with the environment via complex networks, if you think about global trade, which is a very complex network connecting the cities to production in other places, to production in the hinterlands. So to be able to actually describe these relations and to model them, you need tools and you need to develop these techniques and the data for that. So that was really my entry point. And as a second kind of research line, I then started to develop so-called stock flow models. So basically where you look at the accumulation of buildings, infrastructures, cars, machines, and try to model how much they are, what they do for society, and especially how they lock us into certain patterns of resource use. So basically coming back to the structural conditions, but thinking more about what locks us into the way we currently operate as a society, and how can we change these lock-ins? Because obviously there could also be sustainable lock-ins. Right now we have a lot of unsustainable ones. So these are my motivations and for these purposes I'm developing a lot of modeling tools to be able to describe the global economy in its interlinkages and to be able to describe these stock flow relations for countries but also for cities. So here for Vienna we are doing projects with the city of Vienna trying to look at the urban metabolism of Vienna in relation to the rest of the economy, the rest of Austria. So these are the approaches we are mostly using. And what I find really interesting and inspiring about this community and the metabolism approach is that it is in very interdisciplinary settings. So we all realize the boundaries or the limits of what we are doing and we reach out to other people to make things more interesting. So for example one thing we are doing is to look at spatial planning tools, how they are applied in Vienna and how they might improve the quality of life in cities, how they might reduce traffic, what that means for the resource use required to transform the city and then do for example interviews with policy makers and other stakeholders to understand their motivations and their reasons for either implementing projects or not implementing them. So kind of reaching out to more social science informed approaches also taking into account the perspectives of the people actually acting on the resource flows that I might be modelling. I think of course one of how people might know you is through your, well as you said, the accounting techniques and the accounting datasets as well. I think perhaps we can help people to get a better idea of the magnitude of the flows that we are dealing with at the global economy and perhaps we can go even further at the national level but your team has developed for a long time these datasets that now is used also by the IRP, the International Resource Panel. Could you also just remind us a bit what is the shared magnitude of flows that are mobilized by our global economy, what are they and how they have evolved perhaps over the last century. Yeah, well so one of the things that my team and also others obviously together developed is something which is called economy wide material flow accounting which is a method to measure the resource use of economies in a comprehensive way and in a consistent way which means that you need methods that you can apply for many countries and over many years so that you get a consistent assessment and can really compare resource use dynamics, resource use productivity and that's a framework that is, as you said, now used by IRP and by Eurostat that's also part of the Sustainable Development Indicators. That's what, number 12? Yes, so we have in the Sustainable Production and Consumption, we have the Material Footprint and the National Resource Use, the Domestic Material Consumption as indicators in there which are really helpful starting points because it allows you to see how much we extract from the earth and that includes all the biomass that we use to feed ourselves, to feed our livestock. It includes all the so-called non-metallic minerals so what we need for construction like sand and gravel, concrete, bricks and then also all the metals and the extraction of them so that's mining is a very big environmental issue so be able to account for these and also fossil fuels obviously, that's also an important energy carrier but at its point of extraction it's a material that has to be dug up and then transformed before we can actually use it for energy and if we look at the global situation right now we see that resource use has been increasing exponentially so it's a very steep curve, it's going up all the time right now we are at about 90 gigatons per year So it's 90 with 90... Exactly, so that's a lot of materials and what we see if we zoom in is that basically in a lot of the high-income countries we see a relative stabilization of resource use but we see that the emerging economies, especially China have been driving global resource use massively because they are developing their cities, their infrastructures providing proper housing and the supply networks that you need for basic services so it's an important thing to have but still it requires a lot of resources and in one of my recent papers we actually showed that China for example now uses more than half of all the concrete more than half of all the steel, of all the construction materials You mean globally from all of what is produced and extracted Exactly, yes and the accumulation of material stocks so all the buildings, the infrastructure, the machinery in China it's an explosive development which is really a single line history in our long-term studies we see that usually economies kind of take decades to really accumulate the levels of stock that we have right now so if we think about Europe for example there is a long history of building up everything China basically did that in 20 years and you see in the curves that right now basically they are... so it's a very big country so they have like half the global stocks and if you look at the... and how was it before? Was it like very minimal? Yeah, before I mean the longer you go back in history the more uncertain it is but for a very long time they had a very very small amount but you can actually see in these results that basically in the 80s they had the first acceleration and then in the 90s and 2000s it really started to boom and now if you look at the stocks per capita for kind of the national average you could say you actually see that China has reached two thirds of the level that we enjoy here in the high income countries so they are basically not far away from catching up obviously there is a lot of spatial inequality and disparities in China so it's the national averages always have to be treated a little bit carefully but I would say that for example on the coastline where all the big cities are that's basically at the level where we are here and I think that explosive development is really important to understand because maybe a lot of people still think that China is maybe the factory of the world poor country and everything but it's not anymore and it will be really decisive how China continues so in our scenario modeling we really see that we hardly see signs for saturation so you would say that saturation meaning that it's going to asymptotically stop a bit like countries like in Europe or the US because over there there are signs of saturation the only signs of situations that we really found were for the basically western European countries so saturation we define it we say that the total amount of stocks so buildings, infrastructure, all the machinery and goods have to be stable because if we have stable stocks then we don't need ever more resources we can actually start to decrease our resource use because we only need to maintain, repair, replace, refurbish and then that's also where the circular economy comes in where a lot of these solutions really have potential as long as we have a massively growing system you need a lot of virgin resources and the saturation question I think is really crucial because that goes back to basic writing from ecological economics, industrial ecology so if you think about Herman Daley, the state economics there you also already see the theoretical foundations that the social system needs to be in balance with the planetary system but if we always increase our resource use and accumulate ever more stocks and lock us into certain practices then there is no way of really stabilizing the system and that's actually also a major challenge for climate change mitigation as we and others have shown the amount of infrastructure and buildings catch up that you might expect if you think the world will kind of converge to a high level of infrastructure and building stocks that would be immense amounts of resources that are probably incompatible with reaching the Paris climate goals so we really need to think differently about how we build cities, how we build infrastructures which kinds, how that happens in a lot of the countries of the world where there is insufficient infrastructure and buildings but also how we stop building more and more in the high income countries so we still see for example Austria a problem because we are kind of a world leader in soil ceilings so we build ever more parking lots ever more roads, ever more houses urban sprawl is maybe kind of the more known term for that but in the end we see this endless expansion and it eats up land it encroaches on the bioproductive land that we have for growing food and feed but it also impacts biodiversity and that's a real challenge so we really have to start thinking about how can we limit that growth how can we think about densifying city how can we think about transforming infrastructure systems that we need less mobility that you have kind of the chance that electrification really has benefits for climate change mitigation instead of fueling more and more and more so in that sense I think you see this in the world and you see that China has a decisive role in the end because their dynamics are really driving global resource use a lot of the other world regions are kind of slowly growing but not as explosively so the next question then will be what's happening in India, what's happening in other middle income countries and we have a large share of the global population which is living in poverty and under supply so that there need to be new solutions there also I think just transplanting our model of development to other places is most probably not compatible with climate goals or biodiversity goals I think that's new approaches are needed and I really hope that our research here in the field can help supply that knowledge and over there so we said 90 gigatons so it's a third to a half which is construction materials could you just give us some series to have an idea so the non-metallic construction minerals they usually make up a third to half of the national resource use then you have a quarter which is biomass a lot of the biomass is actually used to feed livestock and then we eat the livestock which is very inefficient from an ecological point of view so also here again we see large potentials from eating less meat basically that would massively impact our resource use and that would also enable feeding the world sustainably that's research from my institute where they show that other people also show that that the kind of changing diets is really important to transform our resource use to supply our social metabolism in a more sustainable manner just so that we have orders of magnitude in mind I think we extract these 90 gigatons then there is what 35 or 40 gigatons of emissions as well and then how much is then goes to the stock and how much of it is then produced as waste so currently we see that a little bit more than half of the resource use is actually used to process into stocks basically so you have the metals where you have the extraction of ores where there is a lot of waste created then you have the metals which are really transformed into products you have all the construction minerals so you could say that actually the most used numbers are something like 60% of global resource use we utilize to build more stocks which in turn the rest of the resource they lock in the flows which brings us to the fossil fuels either we operate the stocks we run the machines, we heat our buildings we run factories or we transform the materials to build the stocks that's the crucial lock in for biomass you can also think it that way so you have a stock of people and they need to eat so they also lock in the flows so I think these what we call the stock flow relations are really important to understand and I think that's a major frontier for the entire field to understand these relations much better because describing the stocks is there is much less official statistics on it it's much harder to track all of these things for the resource use numbers that we mentioned here you have much more information and also people have been working on that for decades now so you have established methods for the stock modeling that's something where I'm working a lot on to really extend that and for the waste you see that most of these materials then accumulate so basically the waste that we see now most of it is basically very old stocks that we demolish or maybe buildings that are torn down prematurely and replaced by something else so these are also significant quantities but they will be much more significant in the future because we have more stock today therefore we're going to have more of a waste in the future so there is kind of this time delay in this system where you see basically that future outflows or future waste is what we built yesterday so that's also a big challenge for the circular economy because you need kind of materials at the high quality level and you need to be able to ensure that for example a house that you build also stands and doesn't crumble so if you have old materials which might be mixed together stuff from demolition then it's not always so easy to really ensure the engineering properties that you need so I think that's something also for the circular economy discussion which is not so often acknowledged that actually dealing with what is already out there which is already built might be a much bigger challenge than designing new products which are very efficient I think we are always very good at designing better products but dealing with the past we often put it under the carpet and we forget about all the dirty and that's for me also something maybe coming back to the term that we are throwing around here the social metabolism or urban metabolism I think for me that was also a very helpful approach to really look at societal resource use because it's very easy to jump on a specific problem that you find interesting I don't know plastic pollution or lead emissions and stuff like that which is all very important but from a socio-metabolic perspective you would say that actually society, similar to a human body needs to reproduce itself so there is a lot of resources that we require just to basically keep our systems, our society, our economy running and that necessarily produces waste and emissions so if we want less waste and less emissions recycling is a good idea but it's an even better idea to start with what you put into society similar what you eat, that's how your body changes so as society similar what we put in will turn into a problem or might be managed well so that's a more kind of systems perspective that's a system that's reproducing itself and that's also why you get a better understanding of how complex it is to really tackle climate change for example because you cannot just get rid of the emissions by I don't know burying them in the ground because the fossil fuels are an integral part of our socio-economic systems so you cannot just replace them like that it's such a struggle and why there needs to be a lot of infrastructure transformation to be able to actually electrify everything to have a lot of renewables in the system so there is a lot of changes needed behind that which will affect society I think that's for me really important to say it's not just about measuring the emissions out there it's actually looking at ourselves, at our own social systems how do we organize, how do we work, how do we live what are the conditions we create for ourselves because these are the ones creating resource use and creating waste and emissions in the end so it turns the perspective away from only looking at the problem in the environment to what is happening in society why do we operate like this and where really the demand and supply side solutions to make change there is a bigger danger in the problem which is the practices as well and you have you're now building not only the stock and flow elements but also you link them to what are they used for we can even push it further and are they used for or not but perhaps before we answer that question let's go to the how are they used because I think this is very abstracted how much is imported how much is wasted and all of that but then perhaps we can think of what are some societal services that we need and how do we allocate them into that you said construction a lot but are there some other elements and how should we look about the nexus between our practices and the stocks and flows I mean one thing is that you see from the literature that basically mobility housing and food are really basically two thirds to 80% of the environmental impacts and problems that we have so I think it's really important to start from that because very often in public discussions you know the discussion is about plastic bags for example it might be good to ban them it might not be good to ban them but in the end the communication is a turtle with something around it I think the thing is that we manage to put very strong images with plastic like on the sea pollution and also animals degradation and all of that but we also forget that carbon exist just everywhere just in all of the pieces of activities that we do and I think here again coming back to the interdisciplinary part for me that's also very exciting here because the stock flow modeling and the supply chain modeling that's kind of standard industrial ecology stuff which I really enjoy but maybe others find not so exciting but when it comes to understanding society obviously you need social scientists different perspectives so we started out with thinking that we can as kind of heuristic inspirational concept to say the stocks and the flows together provide services so if you have a house you need some energy to heat it and then the service would be a well tempered room that would be a kind of a functional functionalist approach a little bit to see it in that way which is fine and there you can learn a lot about efficiencies in the system you can learn a lot for example there have been amazing studies looking at how much energy would we need to supply the entire world with decent living standards with Julia and Rao right? Yes exactly a lot of work around which is really exciting and which also features in the latest IPCC reports I think it's good to look at that but it's one approach to look at it and then the other one would be practices which is something which we recently started working with so it shifts the focus away from these very specific things like living space or mobility or whatever and you start thinking about what are practices and practices you would say they are a combination of meaning so what do we ascribe to certain activities to the competences that we have and to the material base of them so for example if we think about mobility there is different mobility practices and you might say that driving a car is associated with a cultural meaning so a car is much more than just a thing driving you around it transports your status, it's freedom a lot of associations are attached to it and that makes it more or less attractive for a lot of people than there are the competences are you able to actually do that? So for example it's totally standard that everyone does a driving license because we're all expected to drive at some point so you earn competences in social settings and then link them to the meaning and then obviously the foundation of all of that is the material base so if there is no roads and no cars your driving license will be a little bit worth less but if societies or if more and more people think that riding your bike is a cool thing to do and it has health benefits and it's good for the environment and it's nice to have some fresh air then that suddenly has a different status and the competences then being able there and then having driving, having bike lanes and if it's socially attractive then that kind of practice will be more successful in recruiting people and actually doing that so I think that's another way of thinking about stock flow service relations because the service is we need to get around, I mean there is no talking around that but what do we attach to it and that's another way to explore these things because I think for social change we need better arguments than just being able to show that something would be more efficient we need to understand why people do it or why people don't do it and it's a more complex understanding of people not the usual economist version where you say people are consumers and they optimize and they are rational and individualistic and whatever you have a huge love for economists as you were saying yesterday night well yes I think that economists a lot of the stuff that comes out of economics actually perpetuates the problems that we have I think but that's another big discussion I don't know if you want to go in there so that's one perspective and then for me it's an exploration to see what else we can think about so what I found really interesting is I read a great paper about so people might know the concept of toxic masculinity so kind of images of how a man should be and often these are very like the strong guy who is doing stuff and pushes things through and is hard and doesn't show feelings these kinds of images of what a man is and there was some great studies looking at the relation between petrol toxic masculinity between driving your car having a big engine having a loud motorbike and how that connects to images of men so you can easily test that whenever you confront people with the fact that we need to get away from car based mobility on a large scale who will react super angry about it and usually it's a little bit older white man who get personally offended by the thought that they have to give up the SUV and they will be enraged about it and on the next day they will be very worried about the future of the children given climate change but still it's so deep in their identity part of their social identity that this is their way to express their status this is the kind of part of their work so hard all their life to have all these things so I think it's important to explore these different perspectives of understanding why do societies organize in the way they do why are certain things attractive why are certain things dominant in the way we do things and what could be leverage points to affect change there and I think that's a important kind of basic understanding or foundational understanding to really have developed broader sets of policies which don't narrow down to the consumers don't narrow down to simple technological silver bullets that never work but to see it more broadly but obviously that's a very kind of broad political agenda than at some point because we live luckily we live in democracies here so that there needs to be a negotiation process and kind of a democratic process behind that so all of these perspectives really help understand why these processes also go the way they do because the rational options are on the table and rationally we know that it's much cheaper and easier to mitigate climate change instead of adapting or destroying everything so that's all proven even if you take mainstream economic models you can easily show that it's much more rational to avoid climate change but still it doesn't happen so why doesn't it happen for me that's really interesting that's not my field I'm not a social scientist but I really like these corporations because it really helps to put these things into perspective but ok perhaps we can go back to this because you said even mainstream economics now wouldn't think that you did a mega meta paper on why decoupling doesn't work but as you can give us back a bit some background of this research what is decoupling and what were the result of this two-part paper yeah thanks for asking that was indeed quite the major effort we underestimated it a little bit at the beginning but the basic idea is that that basically goes back to literature and UNEP reports from 10 years ago so decoupling basically means that if you have economic growth so more production more consumption we actually want resource use to not grow at the same rate as economic activity but actually grow slower which we would call relative decoupling or even to actually decrease that would be absolute decoupling so you can imagine if you have two lines basically you see GDP going up and resource use going down and in the UNEP framework what they also said is that we should be getting better at creating more well-being from production and consumption so another decoupling so to say you try to get better at creating well-being you try to reduce resource use and if we can then also decouple environmental impacts from resource use so climate change impacts all of these things then that would be even better so to say so there are three types of decoupling somehow exactly so there is different relations so well-being production and consumption resource use and then the damage to environments and each of them ideally would be decoupled and that's the basic framework for ideas such as green growth for the environmental that's the same idea just in a little bit different framing in the end if you look at for example arguments about technological solutions they all aim at these kind of decouplings and that's underlying so many discussions and we decided to do a so-called systematic review which means that you have a standardized procedure to collect basically all the literature that is out there English language literature because that's what we could read which kind of mentions these words or does research on it so I think we had something like 11,000 articles and then we assembled an international team I think like 15 people from all around the world who work together on this and the first thing is that you screen all of these papers and you basically select which ones really do empirical work on decoupling on a kind of we looked at those which do more kind of aggregate indicators so there is lots of studies I don't know certain specific air pollution in a city somewhere so these are very specific we excluded those we looked at national to global relations for energy for material use for greenhouse gas emissions and we collected all of those and we found 830 papers out of the 11,000 exactly these ones were really relevant and then we looked at those very closely we assessed the quality we looked at the main results, we looked at what insights come out of it and for me the really interesting part was so firstly what we really saw is that a lot of the literature is not well done and that there is a lot of studies where people don't even understand what kind of measures they are actually using so for a lot of studies we had to dig into the primary resources to actually find out what they were doing there because there is so you redid 800 studies more or less from scratch just to validate, yeah, exactly and what is really interesting from that kind of work is that so firstly we do see absolute decoupling in about 18 to 20 high income countries we see this from a production based perspective and from a consumption based perspective so the footprints are also absolutely decoupling so the trade is included in some trade production in China is included, all of these things are there that's kind of the supply chain modeling that we mentioned so there is some signs that it's ongoing these few papers which show that they also caution that there is no automatic decoupling happening it's not a natural thing to just occur so most of these countries had environmental policies they were pushing decarbonization issues they were countries with established infrastructures and established cities so they need also less resources because they are only slowly growing everything and not explosively growing everything all the stocks so you have the northern European countries you have the UK, you have some of the Germany France, so a few of those countries and what the thing is there that we see these things happening one part is that it's not that this is automatically going to improve all the time so for some of these countries you see that there were periods of 5 to 10 years of absolute decoupling then for example there was the global financial crisis what do governments do? they refinance everything and they start a lot of construction projects and investment projects to boost the economy resource use goes up again and the absolute decoupling is gone again so that can easily happen and the other part is that basically a lot of the footprints are going down because the countries are cleaning up their own energy systems and China is cleaning up its production, relatively cleaning it up so a lot of the major increases of the footprints that we have seen in the 2000s where everybody was extremely worried where globalization was fully rampant around the globe that was basically China being the factory of the world as the saying goes there is a lot more and more and that affects the footprints of the high income countries and actually makes them decrease so we see some signs of hope I think that's a good thing there is policy can work, measures can affect these resource use and their missions it's by far not enough to reach the Paris climate goals but it's going in the right direction and I think that's really important what's fascinating to me is that we looked at various indicators because as we said material use is related to energy use without energy nothing moves around and then you always have emissions so there is these interlinkages or these necessary dependencies and what we see is that exergy is a measure of the work that energy really does for society so for example a warm room we don't want fuel, we want a warm room so exergy measures how well we can warm the room or run a production process or move the car around exergy is tightly coupled to economic growth which makes sense but the mainstream economists usually don't think that and a lot of the decoupling that we have been seeing actually is because we are getting better at delivering exergy so we are burning less coal for example we are getting more and more renewables in so you get major decreases in primary energy use therefore also in emissions therefore also in other impacts and problems now we see progress but it's limited so as long as the economy is growing we will need ever more exergy so we will need more so that's kind of a growth push and then on the other hand we are also decarbonizing relatively so we see some decouplings for the emissions happening because we are getting cleaner energy systems in so that's the good sign but I have to I was now talking about 18 countries which show good progress we have 160 countries around the world with many billions of people which are still building up basically and there you see hardly any decoupling as in the majority of the world you see a little bit of relative usually but no absolute decoupling in these countries with the massive construction boom and everything in the 2000s you actually saw that in the literature they call it hyper coupling so basically resource use was increasing faster than economic growth so it was just a very different dynamic and very different pathway of development that countries are taking so basically a lot of these decoupling dynamics they are far not enough to reach climate goals they are not widespread enough to really say okay this is all going in the right direction we are doing fine there is so much more effort required and the systematic review just shows a lot of the problems in these kinds of literature it cautions a lot of warnings and I think the main kind of policy conclusion that we would have from that is that only strong demand side and supply side measures in combination can deliver more decoupling it is not enough to only go efficiency to only go technology we need to think about different demand patterns and different structural conditions for how we consume and that basically we need absolute targets to really get somewhere so for example a lot of environmental policy often has relative targets which means resource use more than x% in the 1990s so a target which is always very beloved is resource productivity or carbon productivity so where you basically measure the amount of production and consumption so GDP and then you take the amount of carbon or resource use and divide them so you basically say how much resource use per euro or dollar or whatever earned and spent and that is usually an indicator which improves because we see relative decouplings so you have something which looks good but as long as we have ever more production and consumption being a little bit more efficient at it still adds up to more and more resource use so I think these relative targets they are really misguiding and misleading because you need to look at the total scale of the economy and not some relative efficiencies so for example a net zero target that's an absolute target if we only say we want to be 5% more efficient in 10 years then that's not that helpful and I think that's something that in policy I mean we do have a net zero target so we don't see any countries on track so having the policy to really steer us to absolute targets I think that's the big challenge that's where the demand and supply side angle comes in to really have a multifaceted approach and do you think we could have so for the only thing that is the limiting factor is more or less the carbon budget that track it somehow to the energy needed and then forward to the materials needed to mobilize all of that I mean because now we were blind to only one metric and I mean coming from the MFA word we are also blind for one metric we're not having a good solution necessarily but do you think we could have these absolute targets as well for many other things like a stock other flows I think GDP kind of hide carbon footprint and carbon budget kind of hides well the reality it's just one number and it doesn't tell us precisely well if you mean that then you also mean this and this and this so that's a wonderful question I think that would be more of a socio-metabolic thinking because in the end if we only talk about carbon emissions we always talk about the end of pipe thing in the end so I mean one of the irritating part for example is that in the latest IPCC report they were really celebrating that for the first time they were able to explicitly say in the summary for policy makers that fossil fuel use has to go down they usually kick that out they only want to talk about emissions they don't want to talk about what goes into the system which would be fossil fuels which would be looking at who is extracting all of that and who is buying all of that but rather only look at what happens at the end the outcomes in that sense looking at the inputs I think that's the crucial starting point and I think the really big next step then also policy is to think about planetary boundaries in general so we have about nine planetary boundaries ranging from land use carbon, biodiversity loss nitrogen cycles, phosphorus cycles plastic pollution so that it encompasses a whole range of things and I think we really need to think about all of these and find that the limits or the constraints that they place upon or should place on society so I think coming to terms with the fact that we live on a limited planet and that we need to be able to stay within these boundaries to not wreck the biosphere I think is really important and that connects to a lot of the other resource flows so if biomass for example connects to biodiversity and land use and greenhouse gas emissions phosphorus cycles and what else then you have things like plastic pollution which also link to the way how we use products and what we do with all of these things so I think that's definitely important and really relevant because the climate debate is super crucial but it's not the only environmental crisis that we are facing that's the problem, that's the depressing part if you look at the biodiversity question I think that's really dire so all the studies we are seeing show massive drops in living species like 50, 60, 80% loss in biodiversity in terms of how many different ones but also how many animals there are in total, how much living biomass there is in total it's really scary because it just means that we are unraveling the web of life in the end and next to climate change these two crises I think they will just dominate the next decades and they will really create the path the future that we will have and our kids will have we've debunked one myth the one of GDP and that green growth can exist let's try to tackle another big challenge circular economy you put your fingers a number of time on it which is the promise that more or less by this time delay we're going to be able to tap into secondary resources and therefore it's going to help us reduce you also did with your team not only looking at all of the flows and stocks for the entire global economy you also looked at how circular the global economy is and also then you did it for Europe and now you have done it at a national level could you let us know a bit what are the insights when looking at the circularity at global and also national level a few years ago we started working on this topic and we started from the comprehensive socio-metabolic perspective so all of the resource flows that we mentioned several times now so if you go through it step by step maybe one of the things is that you very quickly realize that all the stuff that we eat or that we feed our animals or that we use as kind of technical energy carriers, fossil fuels there is no circularity there to be had because it's either burnt or digested in the end so you could have some cascades as they call it but in the end there is not much possibilities there and wait so that's how much of the materials that have that's basically half and then the other part we build all of these stocks so there is not much recycling to be had there so we have a very tiny amount of resources really being recycled and going back so that's what we call the input recycling rate how much of all the resources that we use is actually secondary materials so basically you will find something like 5-10% of input circularity that's the top we could, yeah I mean you could improve it but you have this systemic barrier so as long as we have an energy system like that as long as we build so much stocks there is limits there the other part is that so that quickly turns the perspective around with all of these resources on the output side you also again see the emissions we can discuss if carbon capture and storage is circular or not I don't know I'm not convinced then we can discuss about better management of biomass waste and excreta and what not but that's also quite limited then we have a lot of the products cars, our furniture, our cell phones I think these more what we call short-lived products that's where circularity especially in its broader vision has good potentials I would say so the broader vision that I see in the circular economy is that it connects a lot of existing thinking into a new narrative I think that's important to realize it's not really new but it's a new narrative on top of a lot of good thinking already and basically I would say that a lot of if you start at the beginning or let's turn it around I have one very good paper by Nancy Bocken she had a very good conceptualization so she basically says it's about narrowing cycles it's about slowing cycles and it's about closing the cycles so what does this mean narrowing means we have to design light weighting, material efficiency maybe even refusing to buy stuff all of these things which make what we need less and then we have the slowing of the cycles which basically means being able to repair to reuse, refurbishing all of these things and design for longer lifetimes and having maybe longer warranties on products all of these things and I think these are really really important and then you have the closing of the loops which often in the end it's about recycling recycling is a good thing we need more recycling but it's an end of pipe solution in the end because you need to collect all of that stuff you need to sort it, you need to pump energy into it to separate materials out you will never get impurities out so there is limits to how well you can really close cycles we are really good at doing that for for example for PET bottles, we are pretty good at that or maybe glass bottles but for many other materials it's just a mess there is too many compounds, there is too many alloys there is too many mixed things if you look for example, imagine a periodic table two thirds of the periodic table are in our electronics minor quantities tiny quantities, you never will get the rare earths out again or the technology critical elements you can get a little bit of that stuff back but in the end that's really not the big lever I would say there is a circular circle which is greening the circle as well you mean the bio loop? no, not only but I mean per se circular economy is not environmental friendly and I think that's also something that if we just close our eyes and go straight for circular economy there is going to be some small disasters happening because we haven't foreseen them absolutely, I think that's one of the tensions with that concept in this broader conceptual vision it has transformative potential but then we are confronted with existing power relations which basically means that a lot of greenwashing is happening that a lot of companies are jumping on board to have a good image and maybe they close some circles and maybe they design a little bit better but if business models are not changing and you are just recycling your plastic bags how circular is that? or if you have a great, I don't know, we had recently we had a talk from a big company and they were very proud that they were recycling the paper cups in their cafeteria and that they were giving kind of stuff to their employees but their business model was about selling fossil fuels so in that sense one has to be really careful and really look at what is happening there what is the so-called circular solution happening and there is a very big clothing company that we all know that has two letters and they are a big sponsor of the circular economy thing in Europe and they brand themselves as that and then if you look at it very closely it's usually the shopping bags that are recycled plastics and that's it that's the problem and I think the other part is that the mainstream discussion on circular economy often interprets it as a new business growth opportunity and obviously as long as we have that kind of economic system that needs to be business opportunities but as long as it's always seen as a growth issue so additional business to the existing one then we need more and more resources because the decoupling is not happening at the rate and scale as we would need it so there is this tension between this idea of growing the economy but actually reducing at the same time and that's why I think it's really important for us as a field to be active in that space because industrial ecology and metabolism research has really great methods and concepts on offer really great data to really tackle this topic on many different levels from the product scale for the company, for the globe, for the national economy and to bring these together I think is a crucial task and that's also why for example recently we as a society decided to form a new section which is called Sustainable Circular Economy it's going to be launched in the next two or three months and it will be a discussion space for everyone who is involved or interested in the circular economy to develop these concepts further and to bring more robust insights into these discussions and to counter some of the greenwashing because most of it is just back of the envelope calculations from highly paid consultants so far exactly in the end very often it ends up to issues like that and very often it ends up to be case studies of things where you can achieve a lot and then people extrapolate from that that everything can be like that that's cherry picking a little bit nothing against these people working on it I think industrial ecology with a firm grounding in the physical reality or thermodynamics I think has really important contributions here on what does it mean to have these cycles what are the energy requirements what are the supply chain implications what are the multiple environmental issues attached to it what are the unintended consequences and I think we can model these things and we can show these things and therefore really help decision makers and activists and interested people to understand what to make of this concept and how to bring it into a transformative pathway as well as as usual pathway which will lead to climate disaster you mentioned just now transformative pathways I think that's perhaps a nice segue because I'm thinking of course of you know as we said before there is a certain structural dependency that if you have a certain stock in the future you'll probably consume something as well how do you foresee the transitions and the transformations in the near future I mean of course this is highly highly linked with political will and political decisions but from what you have studied and how you have seen year after year all of the data points adding up the curve is going up most of the time let's imagine that we want to orchestrate and transformation what are some of these leverage points that we can activate quite easily in order to have a big impact well easily that's an important adjective but let's maybe start with kind of basically mainstream answers also before we go into more broader ideas but I would think that the idea of socio-ecological tax reform which has been around from environmental economics for decades now I even looked at the first European environmental strategy from the beginning of the 90s where they already showed that this would be good I think that's a really important leverage point because in the end currently we are creating most of the tax base of economies comes from taxing labour and not from taxing resources and resource use and so OECD has shown that basically most of the high income countries a few percent of the budget comes from environmental taxes if you think about it it's crazy isn't it what's the incentive, the incentive is to save people get rid of jobs yes, so if the incentive is to save or to get rid of people because they're expensive and resources are cheap what are companies going to do, basically they have to use more resources and not save on them so I think here shifting the tax base towards resource use, towards emissions and also towards getting companies and the rich people to actually pay their taxes is an important thing because there is a lot of economic incentives and they do work to some extent the other part I think is basically regulation so product standards producer responsibilities for repair services for extended lifetimes to have all these things in place set the boundaries to say if you want to sell products here they have to be long lasting, they have to be repairable they have to be highly efficient and yes they will cost a little bit more but if you look at the entire lifetime usually you save so much with more efficient products so I think that's really important shifts and that's not even a radical proposal that's kind of the classical that any economist would probably subscribe to that the question then is always how much vested interests are there and how well they are able to kind of soften these measures as we have with the European emissions trading system which has been undermined by vested interests so these would be helpful I think and this would already help a lot and then the third part I would say is we need to look at what we call the structural conditions of everyday life so in two weeks we will launch the special assessment report on climate friendly living for Austria and we looked at a lot of what we call structures going from infrastructure, mobility patterns but also the legal system and the norms and stuff like how do we do what are the rules for advertisement and all of these things so there is a lot of these institutions and norms in society which kind of govern how we can live so if we look at these step by step and I think there is a lot of leverage points also there so infrastructure is a pretty obvious one the example with the roads that's easy to understand but it also goes deeper so there is a small example for legislation we have all these expiration dates on our food and they are not driven by how long that stuff really lasts they are driven by the worry that the producers could get sued if one of the things goes bad too early so they have that incentive there is not to have food which can last longer but rather to avoid any lawsuits and to manufacture everything for that market so I think that's another point or just an example basically of how rules then influence our decisions so I think a lot of these things can help and then on the other hand the scale of the transformation that we need so basically if we want to achieve the Paris goals we need to reduce emissions by 6-10% per year that has never happened in history entering Covid it was what? 4 or 5? yes exactly so it means a Covid every year yeah but that was a disaster that was no transformation that was just horrible so I think here also again what I find also interesting is that setting clear targets is really important so I really enjoy the phase out discussion until when are you allowed to sell fossil-fueled cars if there is a clear target and if it's credible that in 10 years you cannot sell that anymore and yes there will be a second hand market but all the companies know it's gonna be over and I think these signals are super crucial because the price mechanisms alone we would need to increase some prices so much to really get these results that the social side effects would be very very big so the classical economist approach of pricing I think has its limit and it needs the regulation, it needs the clear targets there need to be clear phase out strategies there need to be work with the unions and with the companies to understand how to create new jobs we are talking about the entire car manufacturing industry which has to shrink massively and change massively and that's just one example where we really see that there is a lot of change required and I think that's really important to build these alliances and to understand how for example working time reduction can help our well-being and the environment creating different jobs, different skills, different programs can help how you can basically get capital to contribute its share to that kind of transformation because there is immense amounts of capital out there we often forget where we're gonna get the money don't worry the money is there all the economic growth of the last 30 years basically has gone to capital because real wages are stagnating so there is huge amounts of money and I think it's really important to get those wealthy actors to address them basically and to make them contribute their share because they are profiting from our society and they are rich because we are all here so now that's their turn so I think that's a tough nut to crack because we are more out there than the measures I proposed in the beginning perhaps as a wrap up big question I think so we are perhaps at the cusp or in the middle of a transition or a tipping point or something like that one of the big elements of socio-economic metabolism are socio-economic or socio-metabolic regimes there were a couple of socio-metabolic regimes could you just quickly name them and then do you envision us going into another regime soon? is that the case for all of the countries I'd love to have your thoughts on that there's a small side question a friend of mine told me ah you're gonna meet Dominique and socio-metabolic regimes you should ask him what is the dependency in terms of pathways going from agrarian to industrial like are you a... but I'm going too far ahead let us start with the basics so to say or with the ideas so this idea of socio-metabolic regime goes back to earlier work looking at society nature interactions so understanding that nature the planetary system is a complex self-adaptive system we have a climate system which interacts with the biosphere and stabilizes to some extent that's why the human race could actually evolve like we did because we had a very stable climate for exactly the time where humans went from being basically apes to hunter-gatherers to where we are now and that was a very specific time the nature was very very stable at a range which was really good for our kind of species if you look at the long-term history it has been very different also before that so I think that's important to realize and then as we said society organizes it's resource use to reproduce itself and in this what we then say is that society nature interacts so the way we use resources the way we gather energy and materials influences our social organization so as a hunter-gatherer society we call that an uncontrolled solar energy regime which basically means that stuff just grows and animals just exist and you gather what is there but you don't influence everything on a large scale and that brings a certain social organization with it you have to be mobile to do that you have to follow the seasons you cannot gather so much so that's very specific and then the transition to the agrarian regime means that suddenly people start to colonize the land they start to burn down forests on a large scale they start farming, they need to build cities they need to build walls to defend themselves so there is a lot of social implications again and then that agrarian regime was a very long period of time until fossil fuels really kicked in and that basically to some extent liberated us also from the constraints of labor intensive tasks exactly and the constraints of land because suddenly we were not entirely dependent on what is growing but we could harvest what has grown millions of years before exactly so that's for me that was really fascinating to learn that and so the regime always is the idea that there is this kind of stable phase so the agrarian society is rather stable and from the historical studies that have been done you can actually see that these kinds of social formations they have very specific and clear resource use patterns so how much they extract and use and usually you see something like a factor 5 to factor 10 increase in resource use between the regimes 1 to 2 tons per year per person the agrarian society would be something like 5 to 10 and then we go up to where we are right now which can range from 10 to 30, 40, 50 tons per capita and this has very different implications obviously for the land with the fossil fuels suddenly we can transform the entire planet which before wasn't feasible because you had people to dig and you had some animals to help you dig basically but that's all you could do so obviously the scale at which we could impact the planetary system was much different and the speed as well exactly and with the fossil fuels I think the interesting thing is we could now debate if there is a stable regime or if we are actually in the midst of the transition because fossil fuel use has really catapulted us to the degree of living but it's not a system that can be stable because climate change will wreck us and fossil fuels at some point will run out so from a more long term perspective you might say okay this might be more like an intermediate stage where hopefully we are able to fully jump to renewable technologies and preserve a high living standard or collapse if you look at history a lot of societies have collapsed after a long time and I think that's really important to see that this is a real possibility I'm not talking about the extinction of humanity that's not on the table but the collapse of the way we organize our living maybe the collapse of the middle class the collapse of the high well-being we have in many places so there is a lot to lose and that's a real possibility climate change is advancing fast the biodiversity crisis is advancing fast and the world is busy fighting wars and quarreling about all kinds of things so in that sense I think the regime idea really helps you to understand that this not everything is specific and singular but actually there is some pretty consistent patterns that you can find and taking it one step further I mean I don't have the exact numbers on top of my head but let's say a third to half of the global population is basically in the transition from an agrarian to an industrial fossil fuel lifestyle so there is the acceleration still to be had and the whole idea of leapfrogging into a green regime could work if the high income countries really want to because we have the technology we have the money we have the institutions because right now there is no absolute example as well of this regime right? you call it the green regime I don't know if there is that's an official name but yeah it would be interesting to see how do you set the example what would be the target as well if we are now to 10 to 30 tons per capita then what would be this new regime in order to be sustainable enough for 5000 years or so exactly so I think that's also a lot of the work happening here in the field also here at the conference we have seen some amazing studies in this direction exploring how much materials we will need in the future energy system how much materials we might need to build enough infrastructure around the world all of this work is happening in the society and I think it's really exciting to see in the end that supplying everyone with a sufficient decent proper provisioning with food living space health education what not within planetary boundaries what is not feasible is to have huge inequalities continue what is not feasible to have a western high consumption lifestyle for everyone these are the things that are not feasible but it's not about so eradicating poverty on this planet is not the problem it's what the rich people like us here in the west and people who listen to this podcast probably count here because we all have computers and internet and stuff like that so in that big picture these kinds of lifestyles lifestyles is not a good word actually but kind of the regime we live in that's not feasible to be globalized and I think that's really important to see and many studies show that we also show for example really interesting relations so that human well-being if you have very little energy and materials well-being is usually not so great not so surprising but what is really interesting to see is that at the kind of intermediate level of resource use you get immense gains in well-being and then at higher levels of resource use in the West you don't see gains in well-being anymore you just see more resource use there is a massive saturation curve there and I think that's also again important to understand a good life doesn't need to wreck the planet endless growth and high consumption that's wrecking the planet and high inequality is also wrecking the planet so these are combined crises these are combined challenges that really kind of give us the space within which we could operate safely on this planet and have some kind of sustainable regime where not everything will be wonderful but at least we could supply the basic needs and we could tackle climate change so all of these things are really feasible but yeah it depends on the on the political pressure applied it depends on social actors it depends on civil society it depends on science it depends on those ambitious politicians who actually understand the planetary crisis we're in to really affect this change and to achieve these because it's feasible but not not automatically done and not just delivered by the market is there any other last topic you would like to discuss about something that we didn't talk about and you think is essential to be shared well what I would like to share is that I invite anyone to join the society to check out our material we have a great homepage, we have teaching materials there obviously we have a lot of scientific publications but they are maybe not so exciting all the time but I think there is really interesting stuff to be had here and I would welcome anyone who's interested to check these things out so the International Society for Industrial Ecology that's the full name here and I'm very happy to be here and to have this great talk with you a few minutes ago, is there any other I don't know, either a message or a book you would like to recommend or something you would like to put out to the people who listen? For an entry into these kind of thinking I would actually really recommend Kate Rayworth's Donut Economics I think that's a really great book to get into and it contains a lot of the stuff that I've been talking about the second author Tim Jackson has been writing great stuff Prosperity without growth for example and a few other recent books I think that's really good entry literature which summarizes a lot of these things in an accessible format I haven't planned it but Kate Rayworth I think was Episode 30 or something Tim Jackson was also here so I don't remember what episode but just look them up, you'll find the discussions they will provide something inside for us as well Well, I think we have covered many things Dominic Thanks so much for this discussion Thanks for having me Thanks as well everyone to listening and watching until the end and don't hesitate, I mean if you have other questions if you have other suggestions how to get into this new regime just write to us, write in the comments and we would like to still engage because I think it's a novel still a topic of research and I think there is much to learn for that So thanks again and thank you and we'll meet in two weeks for another episode Cheers