This talk will be presented by Stefan Giljum (Vienna University of Economics) on Friday, April 29 at 3PM in a hybrid format.
If you would like to attend the talk, please send us an email.
Title: “Global assessments of resource extraction, environmental impacts and supply chains”
Abstract:
In the era of globalisation, supply chains are increasingly international, thus disconnecting the location of production from final consumption. Consumption has developed into a major, geographically distant driver of various local environmental impacts in countries producing raw materials. Despite continuous developments, the spatial resolution of methods to assess global supply chains from raw material extraction to final demand and to calculate consumption-based (or footprint) indicators has been limited to the national level. This leads to distorted results, as the heterogeneity of environmental conditions within producing countries is not taken into account. In my talk, I will introduce novel assessment frameworks developed in the ERC FINEPRINT (www.fineprint.global) and other projects that allow quantifying material footprints and related environmental impacts on a high spatial detail. The framework includes assessments of the geographical distribution of raw material extraction in countries world-wide and linking these global extraction maps to spatially explicit data on environmental impacts, to address issues such as land use change, deforestation or water scarcity. We also develop multi-regional input-output models that include sub-national information in major resource extraction countries, in order to trace raw material flows and related impacts along global supply chains to the country of final demand. These novel approaches improve the understanding of the relations between global drivers and local impacts in hot-spot extraction regions and supply chains. Our results are relevant to a wide range of policy initiatives to mitigate the environmental impacts of resource extraction and to achieve more sustainable production and consumption patterns.