Documents Wiedenhofer, Dominik 4 results

"Beset by an unprecedented combination of challenges including globalisation, demographic shifts, high unemployment and climate change, Europe is in dire need of a new kind of growth and development strategy. The authors of this Forum make compelling arguments for a socioecological transition, in which traditional measures of progress like GDP growth are downplayed in favour of factors such as social inclusion, environmental welfare, high levels of employment and the well-being of European citizens. This Forum explores some of the issues that must be resolved in order to fully achieve the socio-ecological transition, including the necessary decoupling of non-renewable energy use from GDP growth, the reduction of income and wealth inequalities, and the encouragement of innovation that is not based on fossil fuel technology. The Forum presents an optimistic path forward for the continent, with practical policy solutions that do not ignore the many obstacles facing a successful transition."

"It is increasingly recognized that the growing metabolism of society is approaching limitations both with respect to sources for resource inputs and sinks for waste and emission outflows. The circular economy (CE) is a simple, but convincing, strategy, which aims at reducing both input of virgin materials and output of wastes by closing economic and ecological loops of resource flows. This article applies a sociometabolic approach to assess the circularity of global material flows. All societal material flows globally and in the European Union (EU‐27) are traced from extraction to disposal and presented for main material groups for 2005. Our estimate shows that while globally roughly 4 gigatonnes per year (Gt/yr) of waste materials are recycled, this flow is of moderate size compared to 62 Gt/yr of processed materials and outputs of 41 Gt/yr. The low degree of circularity has two main reasons: First, 44% of processed materials are used to provide energy and are thus not available for recycling. Second, socioeconomic stocks are still growing at a high rate with net additions to stocks of 17 Gt/yr. Despite having considerably higher end‐of‐life recycling rates in the EU, the overall degree of circularity is low for similar reasons. Our results indicate that strategies targeting the output side (end of pipe) are limited given present proportions of flows, whereas a shift to renewable energy, a significant reduction of societal stock growth, and decisive eco‐design are required to advance toward a CE."

"This report tackles three issues. It outlines an intellectual framework for understanding socio-ecological transitions as transitions between different societal energy regimes and co-dependent ecological changes. It is shown that while Europe has completed its historical transition into the fossil fuel based industrial regime and has reached an energetic and material stabilization phase (at high levels), its new transition, away from fossil fuels, while inevitable in the long run, has just barely begun. At the same time, globally, a number of very large societies right now undergo the historical transition, the transition into a fossil fuel energy regime. This creates a very complex situation for Europe's new transition. Secondly, the report analyses, in a radical approach transcending the green jobs concept, in which way the historical? transition has fundamentally transformed human labour, and what can be learned from this, and from changed framework conditions, for labour in the new socio-ecological transition. Thirdly, it screens a large array of literature (extensively documented in the appendices to the report) to extract well grounded and so far possible quantitative assumptions about how global framework conditions are evolving, up to 2025 and later. It characterizes six global megatrends, three originating from natural, and three originating from societal drivers, that will impact upon Europe, either in a more friendly or more tough fashion. Finally, the report sketches possible policy strategies in which way Europe might interpret and pursue the new socio-ecological transition; it distinguishes between no policy change, ecological modernization? and sustainability transformation?. This marks the starting point for a further more detailed analysis by other working groups of the project NEUJOBS, as well as scenario and modelling efforts of the future of human labour in Europe."

"The concept of a circular economy (CE) is gaining increasing attention from policy makers, industry, and academia. There is a rapidly evolving debate on definitions, limitations, the contribution to a wider sustainability agenda, and a need for indicators to assess the effectiveness of circular economy measures at larger scales. Herein, we present a framework for a comprehensive and economy‐wide biophysical assessment of a CE, utilizing and systematically linking official statistics on resource extraction and use and waste flows in a mass‐balanced approach. This framework builds on the widely applied framework of economy‐wide material flow accounting and expands it by integrating waste flows, recycling, and downcycled materials. We propose a comprehensive set of indicators that measure the scale and circularity of total material and waste flows and their socioeconomic and ecological loop closing. We applied this framework in the context of monitoring efforts for a CE in the European Union (EU28) for the year 2014. We found that 7.4 gigatons (Gt) of materials were processed in the EU and only 0.71 Gt of them were secondary materials. The derived input socioeconomic cycling rate of materials was therefore 9.6%. Further, of the 4.8 Gt of interim output flows, 14.8% were recycled or downcycled. Based on these findings and our first efforts in assessing sensitivity of the framework, a number of improvements are deemed necessary: improved reporting of wastes, explicit modeling of societal in‐use stocks, introduction of criteria for ecological cycling, and disaggregated mass‐based indicators to evaluate environmental impacts of different materials and circularity initiatives."