or service (as long as there are prices on the natural resources or waste created) but
don’t really suggest using fewer resources in total. ‘Making more’ and ‘consuming
more’ remain the dominant partners in the formula.
One study that tried to untangle what seem to be contradicting observations was
undertaken by an international group of ecological economists working with
Thomas Wiedmann and published as ‘The material footprint of nations’ in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US (PNAS). They show
that DMC, despite being the lead indicator for the Green Growth and Green
Economy studies and strategies of the EU, OECD and also the UN Environment
Programme (UNEP), hosts two big blind spots:
(1) it captures only those materials that made it into the final products and leaves
all the waste and extraction created in the process unaccounted for;
(2) it allocates the resource extraction figures in the country where they occur and
not in the countries where the products they are used for are consumed.
This means that all the environmental impacts associated with extracting and
processing raw materials into goods fall out of the picture. These include water
resource depletion and pollution, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, mine tailings, and
natural destruction or pollution through spillages and agrochemicals. In particular
the production of metals involves digging out ores and turning them into concentrated commodities. It also means the obfuscation of the way in which the globalized supply chains rich countries use to primarily import materials or even
semi-finished products relegate consumption and natural impact to two separate
balance sheets (Wiedmann et al. 2015: 6273). This ‘leakage’ effect has already been
criticized in connection with the commonly used statistics and thus negotiations
about CO 2 reduction commitments.
To tackle these blind spots the research team used the Material Footprint
(MF) as a consumption rather than production indicator. It measures all the natural
impact that a particular economy creates, including unused extraction, and
regardless of where resources happen to be taken out. The indicator has also been
called Total Material Requirement (TMR) and comparing it with DMC shows a
“process of externalization of resource-intensive processes of mature economies” in
which the MF per capita becomes considerably larger than the standard measure
(ibid.: 6273). The United Kingdom and Japan are at the extreme end not only
regarding this statistical aberration but also in their dependence on imports for their
levels of final consumption.
When checking for correlations with factors that influence the levels of MF—
such as availability of raw materials, density of population or GDP per capita—the
findings confirm “a very strong link found previously between growth in building
materials, ores, and fossil fuels use and economic growth in most of developing
Asia, most notably in China,” and, as in many other studies working with footprint
indicators, with levels of income. For “a 10 % increase in wealth, the MF would
increase by 6 %” (Wiedmann et al. 2015: 6273).
3.2 How Mainstream Economics Views Nature and Its Governance
89
don’t really suggest using fewer resources in total. ‘Making more’ and ‘consuming
more’ remain the dominant partners in the formula.
One study that tried to untangle what seem to be contradicting observations was
undertaken by an international group of ecological economists working with
Thomas Wiedmann and published as ‘The material footprint of nations’ in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US (PNAS). They show
that DMC, despite being the lead indicator for the Green Growth and Green
Economy studies and strategies of the EU, OECD and also the UN Environment
Programme (UNEP), hosts two big blind spots:
(1) it captures only those materials that made it into the final products and leaves
all the waste and extraction created in the process unaccounted for;
(2) it allocates the resource extraction figures in the country where they occur and
not in the countries where the products they are used for are consumed.
This means that all the environmental impacts associated with extracting and
processing raw materials into goods fall out of the picture. These include water
resource depletion and pollution, soil erosion, biodiversity loss, mine tailings, and
natural destruction or pollution through spillages and agrochemicals. In particular
the production of metals involves digging out ores and turning them into concentrated commodities. It also means the obfuscation of the way in which the globalized supply chains rich countries use to primarily import materials or even
semi-finished products relegate consumption and natural impact to two separate
balance sheets (Wiedmann et al. 2015: 6273). This ‘leakage’ effect has already been
criticized in connection with the commonly used statistics and thus negotiations
about CO 2 reduction commitments.
To tackle these blind spots the research team used the Material Footprint
(MF) as a consumption rather than production indicator. It measures all the natural
impact that a particular economy creates, including unused extraction, and
regardless of where resources happen to be taken out. The indicator has also been
called Total Material Requirement (TMR) and comparing it with DMC shows a
“process of externalization of resource-intensive processes of mature economies” in
which the MF per capita becomes considerably larger than the standard measure
(ibid.: 6273). The United Kingdom and Japan are at the extreme end not only
regarding this statistical aberration but also in their dependence on imports for their
levels of final consumption.
When checking for correlations with factors that influence the levels of MF—
such as availability of raw materials, density of population or GDP per capita—the
findings confirm “a very strong link found previously between growth in building
materials, ores, and fossil fuels use and economic growth in most of developing
Asia, most notably in China,” and, as in many other studies working with footprint
indicators, with levels of income. For “a 10 % increase in wealth, the MF would
increase by 6 %” (Wiedmann et al. 2015: 6273).
3.2 How Mainstream Economics Views Nature and Its Governance
89