Research Group 3: Profile

Remit and Vision

Practically every human activity involves the use of materials and therefore also of basic commodities. Extraction, processing and each phase in a product's life entail substantial harm to the environment. Sustainable handling of resources is therefore an important task for the future. Research Group 3 aims to show paths towards maintaining the physical basis of society and economic activity in the long term, and develops methods for analyzing, evaluating and managing material flows and resources. The vision of the Material Flows and Resource Management Research Group is an economy that is embedded in natural material flows with minimal resource use ("Factor 4 to 10") and does not develop at the expense of other regions. Against this background, society's metabolism is examined, from extraction to final disposal of all material resources.

Research Questions

What does sustainable resource use look like, and how can we achieve it? That is the question addressed by the Material Flows and Resource Management Research Group. There is an immediate need for research on the sustainable use of non-renewable and renewable resources - research, moreover, that takes account of the limited availability of land and the requirements of natural and material metabolisms, and combines approaches from natural sciences, engineering, economics, planning and the social sciences. The economic areas to be analysed include the European Union as well as international, national, regional and local levels.

The Material Flows and Resource Management Research Group

• examines the dynamics and structures of the "industrial metabolism",
• analyses information on indicators and goals that is relevant for policy,
• develops scenarios of sustainable resource use,
• formulates and evaluates resource management and policy.

Two Focus Projects illustrate the core themes of our research:

• Increasing Resource Productivity without Shifting Environmental Burdens
  Quantifying the economy's material turnover will be an important field of policy analysis and impact assessment in the coming years. Increasing resource productivity requires economic, institutional and technological assessments. An increase by a factor of 4 to 10, compared with today's situation (as a benchmark) would contribute to overcoming obstacles in the fields of energy, transport and climate policy. However, it is important to achieve this without simply shifting the environmental burdens related to material flows elsewhere. Studies in this Focus Project seek to show how existing approaches take account of sustainable material resource management and sustainable land use; they identify shortcomings and outline resource management as a new policy field.
• Integrated Assessment of Land Use and Material Flows
  The extraction of raw materials, their processing, use and disposal requires space. Farming for food and for renewable resources, building and transport, resource extraction, landfill, recreation and infrastructure as well as nature conservation all compete for space in a struggle that is becoming increasingly fierce. Against this background, the research group seeks to develop an integrated assessment method for sustainable land use and material flows which takes these manifold demands for land use into account.

Methods

The integration of expertise from the natural sciences, engineering, economics, planning and the social sciences enables RG 3 to handle integrated assessment models, information systems and policy evaluations for sustainability. Applied environmental research; material flow analysis of economic areas and of supply, usage and disposal systems; institutional analysis and regional science constitute the methodological background for the group's research. The starting point is the analysis of the "ecological rucksacks" of products and consumption as well as of foreign trade. In developing prospective scenarios for sustainable resource use, the Wuppertal Institute is breaking new ground.

Practical Orientation

The research group's work is relevant at national level, for the European Union including the Pre-Accession Countries, developing and newly industrialising countries, but also for North Rhine-Westphalia, a highly developed region undergoing structural change.

The research results are intended to facilitate the formulation and implementation of sustainability policy. To this end we pursue a strategy of proactive communication about eco-efficient products, services and strategies (www.faktor4.org).