 Hello and welcome. In this new video you will learn how to carry out a material flow analysis for a city, country or region that will ultimately enable you to do illustrations like these ones, helping you to summarize all of the material requirements for an economy. In a previous video we showed what is a material flow analysis and what type of insights you can extract from such a study. So I highly encourage you to watch it before continuing so that you have a better grasp of what I will be talking in this one. In essence the material flow analysis is just a systematic assessment of the flows and stocks that enter, exit or are stored within a system over a period of time and within a system boundary defined in space as well. So today what we're going to look at is something a bit more tangible or a bit more applied. In our case this is the economy wide material flow analysis so instead of looking at an abstract system we're going to look at the economic system that can be at any given territorial scale so in our case the city, the region or even a country. The beauty of this economy wide material flow analysis method is that it is quite standardized and harmonized and it's being used by a number of people. What does it really mean? Well the idea behind this method is that we measure whatever comes in, whatever exits and whatever stays within an economy. In reality it describes the interaction between what we call the domestic economy of our system and the natural environment and the rest of the world economy. The main difference of this method from any other method is that instead of measuring flows in terms of monetary flows we measure stuff in physical terms. So in other words in tons, kilotons and kilograms and these material flow analysis are also compatible with other national accounts that help us to have a more holistic or systemic environmental and economic analysis of a territory or an economy. There is quite a history in this method. I'm not going to go through many details but what I want to say is that a number of researchers back in the day kind of developed it and have tested it and since now a number of years, European Statistical Office, so Eurostat, has standardized or has developed a methodological framework around it and now since 2011 all member states need to report their economic wide material flow analysis to Eurostat. So I'm going to show you how it works. It's kind of a ledger that they have to fill in and report it back to Eurost. It means that today many countries have reported their annual material flow data and we can have a time series looking at how these flows evolve over time. The newest version of this method has been released in 2018 by Eurostat and a newer version from a UN environment has been released I think in 2021 which relies on the same principles. Now what does it look like? Over here you'll be always seeing some links so you can always go back and look by yourself. So this is what the economy wide material flow accounting handbook, the 2018 version looks like. So you can go to this website and what it tells you is that first of all it looks at the economy or the interaction between the economy and the environment or the the rest of the world economy. It looks something like this. So you can separate three elements here, things that enter your economy, things that stay in your economy and things that exit your economy. So let's start with what enters your economy. Well what enters your economy, what you can extract locally from your territory. So you can extract sand, you can extract biomass and many other things. You then process it in your economy. You also input in your economy imports, so stuff that do not come locally but are imported in your economy. These can be raw materials, these can be secondary materials or processed materials and these can be finished goods as well. And finally you have also balancing items which are I'm going to explain in a second what their use is. Then we're going to go directly to the outputs before we go to the what stays within your economy. So the outputs are what? First of all is what we call the domestic processed output. In other terms these are just pollutions to air, soil and water and then we have exports. So manufactured goods that either are transiting or most in most cases there is added value locally in your economy and then are exported. And then from there we have balancing items coming in and coming out. What are those? Well imagine we import fossil fuels within an economy, right? These enter your economy and measure x amount of tons or kilotons. Well to actually use the the fossil fuels you need to burn them and in order to burn them you need oxygen and this oxygen will be will be accounted for in the balancing items entering and and also exiting. So let's say vapor or water or something like that, a water vapor. And so the idea is in order to have a balanced material flow analysis, if you remember from the previous video we say that material flow analysis is a balancing exercise as well, we add these balancing items. And so in total you have whatever comes in, imports, domestic extraction and the balancing items, whatever goes out, the processed output, so the pollution, the exports and then the balancing items that go out. And then if you subtract what goes out from what comes in is what stays in your economy, right? If it entered and it doesn't exit it means that it stays in your economy for more than a year and so therefore we call it a net addition to stock. This can be a negative one as well, if you demolish more than you build for instance. So a good way to understand a stock is the built environment, the infrastructure, all of that and either you increase it because you put more buildings, you put more cars, you put more infrastructure or you deplete it because you demolish or you waste more. So that's the schematic overview of how the exchange between our economy and the environment is represented in the economy-wide material flow analysis. Now please, you have to underline that in this method, this particular method, water flows are not accounted for. Why? Because in terms of mass, water flows are so huge that they would dwarf all of the rest. So in terms of water for instance, I think in one city it's 10 times more than the things that enter the rest, right? Then electricity is also not represented or not taken into account in economy-wide material flow analysis. Why? Because it's not a material flow. Electricity is measured in kilowatt hours or joules or something else, but it's not a material, whereas fossil fuels are also materials, you can measure them in tons. And so it's not complete in terms of all of the flows that enter and exit, but it's all of the material flows. And so remember that whatever we have here in this material flow analysis is measured in tons, kilograms or kilotons. Now once we have this schematic overview of the economy-wide MFA, the idea is to put numbers behind these flows. And how do you do that? Juriset has developed a questionnaire that enables you to put all of these numbers like a ledger of what enters, is extracted, is imported, exported, and wasted from your economy. So if you follow this link here down below, you will be able to download this Excel file. And as you will see, this Excel file explains you this whole process of how economy-wide material flow analysis works. And you will also see there are some tabs over here, table A, table B, and all of that. If you click in one of them, for instance, table A, you will see on the left, which is table A, are domestic extraction. And over here you see that you have, first of all, four main categories. So we cannot see them all here, but the four main categories is biomass, metallic minerals, non-metallic minerals, and fossil fuels. These are the four main categories of what's extracted, imported, and exported from economies. These are the main four categories. So in biomass you have all of the food, all of the forest, all of the fish and stuff like that. In metallic minerals you have iron or steel, you have copper, you have zinc and all of that. In non-metallic minerals you will find sand, gravel, and all of the products that are byproduct of this. And then in fossil fuels you will have petroleum products, you will have natural gas, you will have coal, and all of these products. And what you can see here, there is a nomenclature in economy-wide material flow analysis, and you have MF1, which is the first material flow category, biomass, MF2, which is metal ores or metallic minerals, MF3, which is the other one, etc., etc. And what you can see is that you have sub-families and sub-sub-families as well. So within MF1 you have MF1.1, which are crops, and within crops you have MF1.1.1, which are cereals. And so the task for anyone that is developing this or carrying out this economy-wide material flow analysis is to add the relevant tons. So for instance, how many tons of cereals were harvested in your economy? How many tons of roots and tubers, so carrots and potatoes and stuff like that? How much vegetables, how much fruits have been harvested by your economy? That's every year. The same thing with metal ores, so iron and nonferrous metals and all of that. So for one given year the idea is that you have to provide all of these information. Then I'm going to explain you where to find all of this information. Sometimes you also develop proxies in case you don't have it. But once you have developed table A, you can now go to table B. Table B is about imports and the total trade, so everything that is within Europe and outside of Europe. And then once again, as you see, you have the same material flow categories or nomenclature and you have to put the same. How much do we import of cereals, of nuts, of fruits, of fibers and all of that? And so you will see that you'll have all of the numbers here and then you add them up for the subcategories and then to the total categories and then to the total as well. So in essence, that's it. That's the economy-wide material flow analysis. Now I'm going to go through each one of them, explain to you where do we find the information. I'm going to give you some examples of what does it look like once we have it and then compare some countries in order to get a better understanding of what these results actually mean. So let's go with the first flow, the domestic extraction. For domestic extraction, what do we account? Well, it's all raw materials that are extracted from the domestic environment, once again the domestic environment and further used in production. So we don't take into account air and water, but we take into account biomass, fossil fuels, as you can see them here, so crops, wood, animals, metals. We will look at iron and copper and zinc and fossil fuels or fossil energy materials. We'll look at coal, oil, natural gas, and also non-metallic minerals, so clay, limestone, sand, salt, etc. So where do you find information for all of those? In most countries you have what is called the geological survey or mine statistics. So for instance, in the US you have the United States Geological Survey. I think you also have the British Geological Survey. In France you have another one. So these are mainly for the metals, sometimes the fossil fuels, and most of the time the non-metallic minerals. They give you a good insight because you need to have permits, environmental permits, to mine stuff. There is one entity that gives you a good idea of what is mine locally in a country. For the biomass, it goes through agricultural agencies. They just kind of be national, but also at a global level, the FAO, so the Food and Agriculture Organization, provides this information at a country level. So they have very detailed statistics that give you, for each of these categories and subcategories, how much was harvested and also what is the productivity for each type of crop. So that's extremely helpful. This productivity or this yield, in case you're not working at a country level, but you're working at a regional level, for instance. And if you don't find this information, you can still use the yield, but then multiply it by your harvested area for any given culture. So that's a bit how domestic extraction works. Now let me give you two examples. The one of France, and this is what it looks like. Over here you see that France extracts every year approximately 600 to 700 million tons. And you see these four main categories of flows that we have discussed. So metal ores, fossil fuels, non-metallic minerals, and biomass. And as you see, there is less and less metal ores and fossil fuels that are extracted in France and more and more non-metallic minerals and biomass that are extracted. And these, therefore, tell you how much of the domestically extracted materials help to sustain economic activities, but also how the patterns of extraction change over time. So you see here that it's relatively stable over time. It has stabilized around 650 million tons per year. And it's mainly these biomass and non-metallic minerals that predominate all of the extraction France. Now if you want, we can zoom in a bit further, and this is for 2017. You can look at in the previous graph, we were looking that most of the extraction was biomass and non-metallic minerals. Now you can zoom in and have a look even further, for instance, in non-metallic minerals. Most of non-metallic minerals is sand, gravel, and crushed rock, a bit of limestone, a bit of clay, and very few salt, well amounts of salt. And in biomass we see that there is a lot that is wheat, sugar crops, cereals, and then you have some grazed biomass and straw. These are mainly to feed cattle rather than humans. And so you have an idea when you zoom in into these materials, what is the precise use of these extracted materials? Sand mostly for construction, straw, many for feeding cattle, and grazed biomass as well. Let's take now a polar opposite example, the one of China in terms of domestic extraction. Over here we see that in the last 50 years the extraction went from 2.5 to 2 billion of tons. So remember before we were at 600 million tons, now we're talking about 2 billion tons. And today it's more than 32, 35 billion tons. It's soon going to go to 40 billion tons. So it has increased by a factor of 12 or 13 in the last 50 years, whereas in France it was rather flat. And you see here that biomass has increased a bit, but it's mainly the non-metallic minerals that have really skyrocketed, a bit of metals, and a bit of fossil fuels as well. So you really see how an economy that is growing, especially the one like China that needs to build its infrastructure, how it has impacted its domestic extraction. And also keep in mind these huge levels of extraction. Over here we talk about 30 to 35 billion tons in terms of domestic extraction. Now if we zoom in a bit further, once again you'll see that there is mostly sand and gravel, a bit of structural clay, a bit of limestone and all of that. And within biomass it's almost half to feed humans, half to feed cattle. And in terms of fossil fuels you see that mostly coal is extracted locally. So it also gives you an idea of a more, let's say not complete economy, but at least an economy that extracts more different types of resources within its own territory. Now you can also do this exercise thanks to the economy wide match of flow analysis, comparing countries one to another. So for instance here we have how much biomass is extracted by country in tons per capita. And you see for instance over here we have Brazil with huge amounts of biomass extraction per capita. Why? Because of course there is you know, soya that has been extracted locally. We also see countries like Ukraine which is considered a huge exporter of wheat and of in general cereals. We also see Finland with a huge extraction of biomass timber for many different purposes. So this really helps you not only to look within an economy how it works, but also disparities between countries about how much they extract and how this compares to other countries. Then let's go to the second flow, the one of imports. Imports is all of the goods that enter within your economy at different stages of processing. So it can be raw materials, it can be processed materials or it can be finished goods. The idea here is that the imported products or raw materials need to be allocated to the material categories that we've seen. Therefore in the case of a car if we say that it's made out of steel then this main component will be allocated to iron. If it's something out of glass it will be mainly allocated in terms of sand for instance. And where do you get this information? Most of the cases you will find it in foreign trade statistics. These foreign trades come from customs and they are compiled at a national or international level through the EU, UN and many other statistical sources. This type of information will probably be finding these three nomenclatures or classifications, the COMEX one, the combined nomenclature or the NST which is the nomenclature standard of transport. So let's now see how much these two countries were importing. So over here France is importing between 200 and 300 million tons whereas if you remember well it was extracting 600 million tons. So a total of a thousand million tons one gigaton. You see here that in terms of imports most of it is what is not actually extracted locally. So metals and fossil fuels, mainly fossil fuels actually. Let's now see in the terms of China. If you remember China was extracting 35 billion tons and is importing approximately 2 to 2.5 million tons. And once again you see this very steep curve going up up here in terms of imports and once again mainly what it imports it imports metals much more actually than fossil fuels and then fossil fuels. Metals really to make stuff that are then exported. So you really see how there are very different ranges between what you import and what you extract but also what type of what type of goods do you import based on what your economy is actually manufacturing and then creating added value. We can go now to the domestic process output. In other terms this is all of the massive waste materials that are generated within an economy. So this can be during resource extraction, during processing, during manufacturing but also through waste management. And this includes pollutions to air so over there you're going to have CO2 emissions, methane emissions and all that. You'll also have water emissions so you'll have nitrogen, you'll have phosphorus, you'll have all of these type of emissions in water and then you'll have landfill so all of the solid waste that is put in landfill. Over there where you're going to find the data you'll have it in environmental agencies, you'll have it in environmental reporting and many other sources. And finally exports, exports is kind of the flip side of imports so it's exactly the way the same way that you measure it and it's exactly the same data sources as imports. So I'm going to skip that but we're going to go to the results and now we can look at the amount of exports of France. So France was importing 250 million tons per year and it's exporting approximately 140 million tons per year so almost half. And we see that there is a lot of biomass products, a bit of metal products and a bit of non-metallical and non-metallic minerals and a bit of phosphorus. In terms of China, we all have this idea that China is really producing and it's mainly living out of the exports but actually if you look at how much out of the imports is exported, China was extracting 35 billion tons, so 35 and then 9 zeros, it's importing 2.5 billion tons and is exporting 400 million tons. So you see that there is a vast difference almost by a factor of 10 of how much it imports versus how much it exports. So even if we have this idea that there is a lot of exports from China there is a lot of consumption locally. The imports are mainly there to satisfy local consumption. And then the last one over here, well you remember we had the balancing items but I'm going to skip this for this video because these just follow specific formulas that can be found in the handbook but for the material accumulation or net addition to stock, what is this? The physical measurement of growth or degrowth of infrastructure within your city or built environment. So it's all of the new materials that enter or exit buildings, infrastructure, and in general in this economy wide material analysis you don't measure it yourself. What you do is that you subtract whatever exits your territory from what enters your territory. So it's not a measurement of your stock but more of a dynamic of your stock. Is it increasing or is it decreasing? Are we putting more stuff in our stock or are we taking stuff out of our stock? A super important element in terms of this economy wide material flow analysis are the indicators. So we've seen these four main flows that I spoke about right before, extraction, imports, exports, and the pollutions. And thanks to these four you can create a number of indicators that we that I will expand on just in a second. Why these indicators are important is that they're used by many other frameworks or accounting programs. So for instance the SDGs are using this specific indicator DMC and I'm going to explain in a second what it is. So out of these basic four flows you can construct different indicators. For instance if you add up whatever enters your system you develop the domestic material inputs. If you add up what enters your system so domestic extraction and imports but you extract exports you have what we call the domestic material consumption. If you don't take into account all of the pollution but you just take into account whatever enters minus what exits your economy we have a rough estimation of what is consumed by your economy. And this is the typical indicator that is used for instance in SDG 12 I think. Then you can have some other indicators for instance the physical trade balance or PTB which just extracts exports from imports in order to understand if you're a net importer or exporter. And then the net addition to stock if you remember well as I said before something that's measured right. So we look at whatever comes in minus whatever goes out from your system. And now you can see this DMC so the domestic material consumption. This gives you a better an idea of all of the things that are actually consumed by your territory. So here we arrive at 900 million tons in terms of consumption for friends. So we've taken out the exports from the extraction and the imports. And you can even start looking at what is the DMC per capita so per person for different countries in the world. So this is the average for EU 28 we're approximately at 15 or 14 tons per capita. And we see that some countries consume much more per capita than others. For instance Finland is 32 France over here is more at 10 or something like that. And of course we can ask ourselves why is a country consuming that much per capita. This can be either because they have local extractions compared to someone else or because they have some extraction but a very small population in the terms of Finland for instance. So you always have to be careful when you look at these aggregate indicators because they hide a number of insights and you need to understand okay what part of the material consumption is hidden here. Is it because they extract a lot, is it because they import a lot, is it because they have a lot of inhabitants or not a lot of inhabitants. So there are some questions that you should be asking yourself. In any case it helps you to have a small benchmarking of different countries in terms of consumption. Then in terms of PTB as I mentioned which is the difference between imports minus exports. So we have the imports on the positive side and the exports on the negative side and we see this small line in the middle that does this difference so the PTB. And so it helps you to understand if France or any other given country is a net importer or a net exporter as a country. Here we see that it's a net importer because this line is above the zero. It also helps you to understand how much you are dependent, what is the quantity that you are dependent and therefore what is our efforts to become auto-sufficient for instance in terms of a country. In terms of China if we look at the PTB we see how dependent China is from the rest of the world in terms of imports. Now where can you find information for all of that and what can you read? I have given you a couple of links over here for your stat and over here for UN so this is the method of UN and I'm going to show you now in a second what you can do with it. So if you follow the links in the description you can go here to your stat the European Statistical Office and you have one page which is dedicated to material flow accounting so it explains to you what is economy wide material flow analysis, the different data collection and publications such as the handbook I was mentioning before and what's the most interesting is that you can look at the different tables or databases they have developed. So for instance if you go here in the material flow accounts and you click on the data browser it will go to the place where you can have all of this information and you can start comparing how much countries have extracted, have imported and all that. So how does it work? Over here you have you choose the country that you want to see and you choose the time, the years that you want to see, the materials so if you remember well we have MF1 which is biomass then MF1.1 which are crops and then cereals so you can choose if you want the global categories which is what is measured or what is selected now or you can go down to the material level of cereals or vegetables per country if you want and then you choose what is the indicator that you want to see so this is DMC but perhaps you want to look at domestic extraction per country and the unit of measure that we have selected so far is 1,000 tons so kilotons and over here you see a comparison of the different countries in the within the economic European area and we can also filter them if we want so here we can see that Poland has extracted 120 million tons or 120,000 kilotons the UK 90 or something like that we can then see some smaller countries like the Czech Republic etc etc and we can have this of course for many years so it's a fantastic tool to have an idea of of how much was extracted imported and all of that but different countries when you're finished you can also download this as an excel file and you can play with it in in your own time if you want now what's also something very interesting this is for European Union and it's quite detailed meaning that you have all of these 76 materials but you can also go at a global level so this global material flow database that enables you to have all of well most of the countries in the world we have I think 190 something countries or 200 countries and it tells you how much is imported how much is exported how much is extracted and for 50 years or so so this is a fantastic element this international resource panel database that has become available I think since a couple of months and you can export it now the full dataset and you can also do your own analysis so this these are great times to to to work on this subject because these databases have become have become available and you can now do very relevant analysis in your own time finally one last point for which economy wide material flow analysis can be very relevant more and more is to measure circularity so the EU has now started measuring how circular the economies are for the different countries in the EU and as you can see it it kind of uses already the economy wide material flow analysis so we have domestic extraction we have imports this is the dmi so the domestic material inputs inputs sorry and then you have things like domestic process outputs you have the exports and they just add how waste is treated to to enable the circularity of it so in a future video I'm going to show you how circular most of European countries are and to compare them so that's it for this video I hope that you find this economy wide material flow analysis method helpful if you have any uncertainties of how it works or if there are some parts that you would like more explanations please add them in the comments if you have any other suggestions for a future video please also add them in the comments we'll try to make a new video for this one and until then please help us reach more people by sharing this video with your friends and colleagues and help this type of methods be more widely used thanks a lot and see you in the next one! Cheers!