Biomass trade results in a growing spatial disconnect between environmental impacts due to biomass production and the places where biomass is being consumed. The pressure on ecosystems resulting from ...the production of traded biomass, however, is highly variable between regions and products. We use the concept of embodied human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) to map the spatial disconnect between net-producing and net-consuming regions. Embodied HANPP comprises total biomass withdrawals and land use induced changes in productivity resulting from the provision of biomass products. International net transfers of embodied HANPP are of global significance, amounting to 1.7 PgC/year. Sparsely populated regions are mainly net producers, densely populated regions net consumers, independent of development status. Biomass consumption and trade are expected to surge over the next decades, suggesting a need to sustainably manage supply and demand of products of ecosystems on a global level.
Socioeconomic legacy yields an invasion debt Essl, Franz; Dullinger, Stefan; Rabitsch, Wolfgang ...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
01/2011, Letnik:
108, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Globalization and economic growth are widely recognized as important drivers of biological invasions. Consequently, there is an increasing need for governments to address the role of international ...trade in their strategies to prevent species introductions. However, many of the most problematic alien species are not recent arrivals but were introduced several decades ago. Hence, current patterns of alien-species richness may better reflect historical rather than contemporary human activities, a phenomenon which might be called "invasion debt." Here, we show that across 10 taxonomic groups (vascular plants, bryophytes, fungi, birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, terrestrial insects, and aquatic invertebrates) in 28 European countries, current numbers of alien species established in the wild are indeed more closely related to indicators of socioeconomic activity from the year 1900 than to those from 2000, although the majority of species introductions occurred during the second half of the 20th century. The strength of the historical signal varies among taxonomic groups, with those possessing good capabilities for dispersal (birds, insects) more strongly associated with recent socioeconomic drivers. Nevertheless, our results suggest a considerable historical legacy for the majority of the taxa analyzed. The consequences of the current high levels of socioeconomic activity on the extent of biological invasions will thus probably not be completely realized until several decades into the future.
The study of long-term historical trends in material flows has gained some prominence in Ecological Economics since the first studies for Austria and the United Kingdom were published as part of a ...special section in 2002. This research expands the existing knowledgebase by presenting material flows for the Russian Federation and its predecessor states employing a standard accounting framework. The study of material flows for the Russian Federation provides an interesting and unique case of a planned economy and its transition to a market based form of economic organization. We show that in spite of considerable differences in the physical economy, the USSR developed material use patterns similar to that of Western industrialized economies. Lower levels of consumption were more than outweighed by inefficient production. The transition towards a market economy drove rapid improvements in resource productivity but also growth in metabolic rates. The results indicate that the transition to an industrial metabolic profile proceeds largely irrespective of economic and political conditions. An improved understanding of the evolution of socio-economic systems and the material flows that fuel them is increasingly relevant for designing new systems of production and consumption and facilitating a transition towards a more sustainable industrial metabolism.
The Global Sociometabolic Transition Krausmann, Fridolin; Fischer-Kowalski, Marina; Schandl, Heinz ...
Journal of industrial ecology,
10/2008, Letnik:
12, Številka:
5-6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Summary
We present the concept of sociometabolic regimes and use it to analyze patterns of change in global social metabolism. Sociometabolic regimes represent dynamic equilibria of society–nature ...interactions and are characterized by typical patterns of material and energy flows (metabolic profiles). From this perspective, industrialization appears as a process of transition from the agrarian to the industrial regime. This article presents a global data set on the socioeconomic metabolism of 175 nations for the year 2000. We group the countries into six clusters differentiated by economic development and population density, reflecting the historical path of (agrarian) development and resource endowment.
Our analysis reveals that per capita material and energy use in industrialized clusters is higher than in developing regions by a factor of 5 to 10. However, per capita use of natural resources differs significantly among industrialized clusters. A large fraction of the global population displays a metabolic profile somewhere in between the patterns typical for the agrarian and the industrial regimes. The sociometabolic transition from an agrarian to an industrial regime is thus an ongoing process with important consequences for future global material and energy demand. If we take a transition between regimes and the current characteristics of this transition as given, the global energy and materials demand is likely to grow by a factor of 2 to 3 during the coming decades. The most critical part of our findings relates to the cluster of high‐density developing countries, as these countries already have a higher anthropogenic material and energy burden per unit of land area than, for example, industrial Europe, with pending further increases bound to surpass carrying capacities.
We employ the concepts of socio-ecological regime and regime transition to better understand the biophysical causes and consequences of industrialization. For two case studies, the United Kingdom and ...Austria we describe two steps in a major transition from an agrarian to an industrial socio-ecological regime and the resulting consequences for energy use, land use and labour organization. In a first step, the coal based industrial regime co-existed with an agricultural sector remaining within the bounds of the old regime. In a second step, the oil/electricity based industrial regime, agriculture was integrated into the new pattern and the socio-ecological transition had been completed. Industrialization offers an answer to the input and growth related sustainability problems of the agrarian regime but creates new sustainability problems of a larger scale. While today's industrial societies are stabilizing their resource use albeit at an unsustainable level large parts of the global society are in midst of the old industrial transition. This poses severe problems for global sustainability.
Rapid economic development in the past century has translated into severe pressures on species survival as a result of increasing land-use change, environmental pollution, and the spread of invasive ...alien species. However, though the impact of these pressures on biodiversity is substantial, it could be seriously underestimated if population declines of plants and animals lag behind contemporary environmental degradation. Here, we test for such a delay in impact by relating numbers of threatened species appearing on national red lists to historical and contemporary levels of socioeconomic pressures. Across 22 European countries, the proportions of vascular plants, bryophytes, mammals, reptiles, dragonflies, and grasshoppers facing medium-to-high extinction risks are more closely matched to indicators of socioeconomic pressures (i.e., human population density, per capita gross domestic product, and a measure of land use intensity) from the early or mid-, rather than the late, 20th century. We conclude that, irrespective of recent conservation actions, large-scale risks to biodiversity lag considerably behind contemporary levels of socioeconomic pressures. The negative impact of human activities on current biodiversity will not become fully realized until several decades into the future. Mitigating extinction risks might be an even greater challenge if temporal delays mean many threatened species might already be destined toward extinction.
Abstract
Emissions from agricultural activities constitute 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are hard to abate. Here, we present and analyze a consistent empirical assessment of global ...emissions from agricultural activities from 1910–2015. Agricultural emissions increased 3.5-fold from 1910–2015, from 1.9 to 6.7 GtCO
2
eq yr
−1
. CH
4
emissions, emissions from enteric fermentation and from livestock products contributed the highest fractions of emissions by gases, processes, and products, respectively. A decomposition analysis quantifies the contribution of major drivers of agricultural emissions dynamics. It reveals that globally and across the entire period, changes in population, agricultural production per capita (‘output’), regional distribution of production (‘regional mix’), and composition of final products (‘product mix’, i.e. a shift towards livestock production) all contributed to increasing agricultural emissions. Conversely, declining emissions per unit of production (‘emissions intensity’), particularly for livestock, partly counterbalanced the emissions increase. Significant variations prevail across regions and time periods. Most notably, the composition of final products counteracted agricultural emissions increase from 1910–1950, but growing livestock production has become an increasingly important driver of emissions growth in more recent periods. This finding unravels that increases in livestock production offset the improvements in emissions intensity of industrial agricultural intensification. Our findings underscore the large potential of reducing livestock production and consumption for mitigating the climate impacts of agriculture.
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