Resilience and Malleability of Social Metabolism

FWF-Emerging Fields Project EFP05 (REMASS)

Figure 1. Wars, geopolitical tensions, pandemics, impacts of climate heating and unforeseen events such as ships blocking trading routes jeopardize supply chains and thereby influence social metabolism. What are possible consequences? How will these risks affect the possibilities to achieve more sustainable patterns of resource use? – The REMASS project addresses these questions.

Figure 1. Wars, geopolitical tensions, pandemics, impacts of climate heating and unforeseen events such as ships blocking trading routes jeopardize supply chains and thereby influence social metabolism. What are possible consequences? How will these risks affect the possibilities to achieve more sustainable patterns of resource use? – The REMASS project addresses these questions.

Problem statement

The rapidly growing use of natural resources contributes to global heating, while current crises such as wars, pandemics or climate extremes jeopardize global supply chains (Figure 1). But how do such crises influence resource use, sustainability, inequality and societal wellbeing? The central aim of REMASS is to kickstart emergence of a new, interdisciplinary field of scientific inquiry focused on these and related questions.

Aims

Core aim of REMASS is to analyze the resilience of resource use to supply-chain disruption crises. At the same time, it will study how these crises affect options for transformations to more sustainable and fair patterns of resource use.

The concept of social metabolism is central for this project. Societies extract materials and energy from their environment that are required for production and consumption processes. REMASS will establish a global database with unprecedented detail to trace flows of resources through global supply chains, from resource extraction to accumulation of materials in buildings, infrastructures and other products to wastes and emissions or recovery of resources through recycling.

Research strategy

REMASS will study how different disruptions during crises affect transformations towards sustainability. Highly resolved social metabolism data will be combined with big data approaches from complexity science to quantify the resilience of metabolism during supply chain disruptions (Figure 2). Social metabolism data will be combined with data describing trade and production networks representing socioeconomic interrelations within social and economic systems. The resulting models can be used to study the resilience of economies and societies to the above-mentioned disruptions and crises, as well as their impacts on ongoing transformation processes.

Another key issue is how resource use changes over space, time and different social groups, in particular during crises, and how that in turn affects inequality and social wellbeing. REMASS will create a solid basis to identify effective reactions to disruptions that can be used as levers to promote fair and sustainable patterns of production, trade, and consumption.

Figure 2. Disruptions of supply chains affect complex networks of production and trade in ways that are impossible to predict using current sociometabolic models. REMASS will develop non-linear system models using highly resolved data on social metabolism; that is, resource flows and accumulation of material stocks in buildings, infrastructures, machinery, etc. This will allow researchers to study the effects of disruptions on patterns of resource use as well as on wellbeing outcomes.

Figure 2. Disruptions of supply chains affect complex networks of production and trade in ways that are impossible to predict using current sociometabolic models. REMASS will develop non-linear system models using highly resolved data on social metabolism; that is, resource flows and accumulation of material stocks in buildings, infrastructures, machinery, etc. This will allow researchers to study the effects of disruptions on patterns of resource use as well as on wellbeing outcomes.

Research topics: nutrition, shelter and mobility

Possibilities to transform patterns of resource use towards more sustainability and social wellbeing will be studied for three important provisioning systems: nutrition, housing and mobility. This research will not only address resource flows, material stocks, and their ecological impacts, but also inequalities, core actors, interests, decision processes and power relations. The malleability of provisioning systems during crises and disruptions hinges primarily on these factors. Six case studies will be undertaken at central places in both the Global North and the Global South to understand how provisioning systems can be transformed towards more equal and sustainable patterns, and how disruptions in supply chains affect these transformation processes and inequalities.

Project leading team

REMASS will be led by an interdisciplinary team of seven researchers (PIs) working in six universities respectively research institutions (Figure 3):

•    Helmut Haberl  (BOKU, Institute of Social Ecology) leads the project and contributes his expertise on socioecological metabolism.
•    Shonali Pachauri (IIASA, research group „Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions“) is deputy project leader. She co-ordinates Module 4 („Interdisciplinary Synthesis and Modelling Lab) and contributes her expertise in energy economics and policy as well as energy poverty.
•    Stefan Giljum (Vienna University of Economics and Business, Institute for Ecological Economics) co-ordinates Module 1 („High resolution database of social metabolism“) and contributes his expertise in material flow analysis.
•    Stefan Thurner (director of the Complexity Science Hub) co-ordinates Module 2 („Nonlinear dynamics of supply chains“) and contributes his expertise in modelling non-linear dynamics of complex networked systems.
•    Cornelia Staritz (University of Vienna, Department of Development Studies) is development economist and co-ordinates Module 3 („Malleability of social metabolism and wellbeing contributions“).
•    Anke Schaffartzik (Central European University, Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy) contributes to Modules 1 and 3. Her expertise is social metabolism, political ecology and social inequality.
•    Fridolin Krausmann (BOKU, Institute of Social Ecology) contributes his expertise in sustainable resource use and focuses on Modules 1 and 2.

 

Figure 3: Project leading scientists: Helmut Haberl (PI), Shonali Pachauri (co-PI), Stefan Giljum, Stefan Thurner, Anke Schaffartzik, Cornelia Staritz, Fridolin Krausmann

Core data

Funder: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, Programm „Excellent=Austria"
Duration of the project: 1.10.2024 - 30.9.2029
DOI: 10.55776/EFP5. Research is funded in whole or in part by the Austrian Science Funds (FWF)