Suchergebnisse

Over the last several thousand years of human life on Earth, agricultural settlements became urban cores, and these regional settlements became tightly connected through infrastructures transporting people, materials, and information. This global network of urban systems, including ecosystems, is the anthroposphere; the physical flows and stocks of matter and energy within it form its metabolism. This book offers an overview of the metabolism of the anthroposphere, with an emphasis on the design of metabolic systems. It takes a cultural historical perspective, supported with methodology from the natural sciences and engineering. The book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the fields of regional development, environmental protection, and material management. It will also be a resource for undergraduate and graduate students in industrial ecology, environmental engineering, and resource management. The authors describe the characteristics of material stocks and flows of human settlements in space and time; introduce the method of material flow analysis (MFA) for metabolic studies; analyze regional metabolism and the material systems generated by basic activities; and offer four case studies of optimal metabolic system design: phosphorus management, urban mining, waste management, and mobility. This second edition of an extremely influential book has been substantially revised and greatly expanded. Its new emphasis on design and resource utilization reflects recent debates and scholarship on sustainable development and climate change.

Today`s "anthropogenic metabolism" involves a huge material turnover. After utilization, materials either remain in the anthroposphere as recycling products, or they leave the anthroposphere as waste and emission flows. To accommodate these materials without jeopardizing human and environmental health, limited natural sinks are available; thus, man-made sinks have to be provided where natural sinks are missing or overloaded. The goal of this study is the development of a new indicator that specifies on a regional scale which fractions of anthropogenic material flows to sinks are acceptable. Case studies show that appropriate governance of anthropogenic material flows and stocks is needed in order to avoid overloading of sinks, resulting in harm on humans and the environmental. Based on the results, the advantage of using this indicator is threefold: First, it satisfies the need for transparency and accountability in policy performance evaluations. Second, it allows comparing and benchmarking regions in view of sink limitations. Third, the indicator aggregates complex information into an easy to understand score and is therefore highly instrumental for communicating scientific results to decision makers and the public.