SUPERVISOR: Fridolin KRAUSMANN  

PROJECT ASSIGNED TO: Daniel GERDES

Humanity is facing an escalating ecological crisis rooted in unsustainable patterns of resource and energy use. An urgent transformative change of the global economy is needed in order to avert catastrophic consequences. With its European Green Deal (EGD), the European Union (EU) aims to become the global leader in the transformation towards sustainability. A central component of the EGD relates to the decarbonisation of the energy and mobility sectors. Achieving these transformations represents a major challenge, not least due to the associated vast raw material requirements. As a result of necessary infrastructure adjustments, the demand for both construction and technology specific materials (such as copper, zinc, nickel, etc.) will increase substantially.

Meeting this surging demand will require a significant intensification and expansion of mining and similar extractive activities, with the bulk of these activities taking place in regions outside the EU. Yet already now, extractive activities have serious adverse impacts on society and ecosystems in the extracting regions, including biodiversity loss, water stress, deforestation or forced displacements. These impacts also increasingly cause social-environmental conflicts. Globally, resource extraction and processing is also accounts for 90% of biodiversity loss as well as half of CO2 emissions and water stress. This raises the question to what extent the EGD will transform the EU’s economy while externalising the associated social-environmental impacts to regions outside the EU, where resource extraction takes place. While one of the three overarching goals of the EGD aims to “leave no one behind”, it pays little attention to the adverse social-environmental impacts associated with resource extraction. How exactly the material requirements of the renewable energy transition and other policies laid out in the EGD will affect social and ecological conditions in extra-EU territories remains largely unexplored.

This question becomes even more pressing considering that the EGD is growth program; and as an absolute decoupling of economic growth from resource use seems highly unlikely, let alone at the required pace, continued growth will require perpetually increasing amounts of raw materials. This raises the question to what extent the EGD does entail a “greening” of the EU’s economy at the expense of people and nature elsewhere. In this context, the dissertation project seeks to answer the following questions:

(1) To what extent will the social-environmental burdens associated with the material requirements of the EGD be shifted to other regions?

(2) Does the EGD represent a real social-ecological transformation, or will it continue the structural offshoring of social-environmental impacts to other regions?

(3) What is the material footprint of the policies laid out in the EGD?

(4) How will the associated extractive activities (in particular mining, agriculture and forestry) affect social and environmental conditions in the extracting regions?

(5) What policies and other measures could mitigate excessive displacement of social-environmental loads to extra-EU territories?

The investigation combines concepts, methods and tools from ecological economics and social ecology. It draws on the theory of “ecologically unequal exchange” (EUE), which ecological economists have developed in order to analyse the uneven distribution of the benefits and burdens associated with natural resource use along global supply chains. International trade allows importers to appropriate resources needed for additions to physical infrastructure and consumption from other regions while displacing the associated environmental impacts. Environmentally-extended multi-regional-input-output (EE-MRIO) analysis has emerged as a powerful tool to provide empirical information on the environmental impacts of global value chains. This dissertation project combines EUE theory and (EE-MRIO) analysis to explore the displaced social-environmental impacts associated with the changing resource use patterns that the EGD will likely bring about.

The project aims to improve the understanding of the scale and type of the likely externalised social-environmental impacts. This understanding is urgently needed in order to adjust and design policies that will ensure the EGD contributes to the global social-ecological transformation rather than to merely shift pressures to other regions.