Marina Fischer- Kowalski
Helmut Haberl
Harald Payer
SIZE AND STRUCTURE OF THE METABOLISM OF AUSTRIAN SOCIETY
Austria is one of the industrial countries for which researchers have started to establish material flow accounts. These accounts look at the amount of materials extracted from nature, used and transformed in one way or another within society, and returned into nature as waste or emissions. Material flow accounts result from more or less simple input-output calculations. They are computed on the basis of methodological assumptions and conventions that are gradually being agreed upon internationally (Ayres and Simonis 1994), from standard economic statistics. This results in a kind of material 'national product', with tons instead of currencies serving as accounting units. Divided by the size of the population, these figures provide the per capita metabolism of the average citizen. When divided by the GDP, they express the overall material intensity of the national economy. Both measures are considered key indicators for ecological performance and for sustainable development (BMUJF 1993; BMU 1995).
In terms of GDP per capita, Austria rates among the ten richest countries in the world. With its present 7.8 million inhabitants, it is a fairly small country .It is not as densely populated as most other European countries. It includes a large share of the Alps and has very rich water resources. As early as 1978, Austria refused to use nuclear energy (by popular vote). About 70% of electricity production is supplied by hydropower. The question is: what does Austria's economy look like, not in monetary terms, but in terms of annual material flows? Water holds, by far, the largest share (88%) of the material input of Austrian society, a total volume of 3.8 billion tons of water annually (1.350 litres per inhabitant per day).1 This shows that 4% of the annual amount of precipitation in Austria is diverted, heated up and polluted by society. About half of this water is needed for cooling purposes in industrial energy production. The next largest segment of material input is air (8% of the total). Three hundred and thirty million tons of air per year (or approximately 120 kg per inhabitant per day) are needed for extracting oxygen for combustion, technical processing, breathing for both humans and their domestic animals. Only 4% of the total input consists of 'materials' in the narrow sense of the word, approximately 60 kg per inhabitant a day. From this materials input about one third is placed in stock (mainly buildings, roads and the like), the remaining two thirds are released annually into the environment as waste and emissions.2
It is important to look at what these raw materials consist of and what they are used for (see lower part of Figure 2), and then group them according to the time span for which they serve as a commodity within the social system before they are released into the natural environment as waste or emissions. Construction materials (mainly gravel and sand, but also wood and metals) make up more than half of material input. Every year another 52 million tons of materials for buildings and other structures are added. The building of infrastructure and housing is certainly the most materially intensive process in industrial societies. The average life-span of these materials is relatively high. The next large input fraction is energy carriers. Energy carriers (in the ecological sense of the term, i.e. recent biomass3 used for the nutrition of domestic animals and for humans, plus gas/coal/oil and recent biomass, used for combustion) amount to about one third of total raw material input. The turnover time for these materials is usually very short. Consumer and durable goods with an intermediate life span (from less than one year to about ten years) hold only a share of approximately 15% of the turnover. It is notable that most 'recycling' and 'increasing durability' arguments refer to this qualitatively important, but quantitatively small, part (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1997).
Payer et al. (1995) have re-calculated the Austrian material flow for 1990, arriving at higher amounts of annual flow due to a more detailed, and as a consequence considerably higher estimate for construction materials.
Interestingly enough, even in industrial conditions, it is the direct extraction of raw materials from nature that accounts for the largest part of material inputs into the economy on a national level. Most of it is extracted within Austrian territory. With respect to water and air, of course, this involves local utilization of a good that is transnational by nature. With respect to the other materials input, about a quarter is imported from abroad, with more than half of that being fossil energy carriers (Steurer, 1992, Hüttler et al. 1997). Equally, outputs are more likely to be released to transnational mediums, like the atmosphere and the water system, than to be exported as commodities. In Austria, 17% of material input is discharged into the atmosphere, mainly in the form of CO2 and H2O. Another 4% of material input is released into the country's rivers (part of it eventually enters the sea). Compared to this 'export of emissions', commodity exports amount to a total volume of only 10% of the input4 (see Figure 1). Thus, even under most advanced industrial conditions, it makes sense to analyse the state and the national economy as a unit. From a sustainability perspective, this means that the use of territorial resources and absorption capacity as a reference is not outdated. According to time series data, however, imports and exports are, both in monetary and mass units, a growing fraction of national material flows, mirroring the increasing degree of international division among labour (Kuhn et al. 1994; Steurer 1994).
THE DYNAMICS OF MATERIAL GROWTH: THE TRANSITION TO INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
How do industrial societies compare with pre-industrial societies? Utilizing research from cultural anthropology, we have tried to estimate the annual per capita material and energy throughput of hunter-and-gatherer societies and agrarian societies (see Figure 2). However preliminary these estimates may be, they convey a sense of proportions. According to these estimates, there is about a four- to five-fold increase in energy and material consumption per capita input, from one social formation to the next. Roughly speaking, a member of an industrial society has a four to five time, greater impact upon the environment than a member of an agrarian society. (For a more detailed discussion see Fischer- Kowalski & Haberl 1997. )
These estimates should also have implications for political discussion of energy and material flow reduction potentials within industrial societies (e.g. Meadows et al. 1992; Weizsäcker et al. 1995). It is highly doubtful that industrial societies could reduce their per capita energy and material flows to a level below that of agrarian societies. On the other hand, if populations living, more or less, an agrarian way of life, strive successfully for an industrial mode of living, their energy and material turnover will multiply.
But what about industrial societies? Are there still dynamics at work that result in a continuous increase in material throughput? Some international analyses imply that during the last few decades, despite continuing economic growth in monetary terms, material flows have tended to stagnate (Jänicke 1995). We have tested this empirically for the total of material throughputs in the Austrian economy during the last two decades. According to this data (which is not yet very reliable), between 1970 and 1990 the throughput of raw materials has increased by more than one third. In the same period, Japan has observed an even steeper increase of material throughput (Environmental Agency 1995), while German data (Kuhn et al. 1994) demonstrate comparative stagnation (see Figure 3).
The increase in the volume of material metabolism, however, does not seem to be immediately related to economic growth. As can be seen from Figure 3, the materials throughput per USD (at constant prices) of the Austrian GDP has continuously decreased since the 1970s. The same applies to Germany and Japan. These twenty years, therefore, have seen a markedly stronger economic growth in monetary units than in tons of materials throughput. The material intensity of these economies has decreased about 20% between 1970 and 1990. The data, therefore, empirically support the possibility that monetary and material flows can be separated or disassociated. It cannot be taken for granted, however, that an economy may grow, while simultaneously reducing the absolute volume of its material metabolism. Still, it must be considered proven that material flows, over a longer period of time, may grow slower than the economy.
THE COLONIZATION OF NATURAL SYSTEMS AND SOCIETAL APPROPRIATION OF NET PRIMARY PRODUCTION AS AN INDICATOR
Indicators of sustainable development, based on the concept of metabolism, focus on material and energy input-output relations between societies and their natural environment. This concept, however, is not sufficient to describe the relevant interactions between society and nature. It is not only the exchange of energy and material that matters. In order to maintain their metabolism, societies deliberately intervene into natural systems and keep them in a state which is different from the conditions that would prevail in the absence of human intervention. This usually requires a considerable amount of technology, labour and know-how. This type of intervention has been called the 'colonization of natural systems' (Fischer- Kowalski & Haberl 1993; Fischer-Kowalski et al. 1997).
The most obvious example for colonizing interventions is agriculture. Agriculture changes species composition, soil chemistry, water tables and many other important aspects of ecosystems, so that plants produce much more digestible biomass than natural ecosystems do. Wild animals are domesticated and bred in order to accommodate societal needs. As a general notion, colonization encompasses not only these changes of biotopes, but also interventions into all kinds of natural systems: biotopes, organisms, cells and tissues, and the genome itself.
The following is an example for an indicator based on the concept of the appropriation of net primary production (NPP). NPP is the total amount of biomass, measured in mass or energy units (tons or Joules), which green plants produce within one year in a certain area. It is the main basis for life on earth and provides the primary input for the food chains of animals, fungi, and most micro-organisms. NPP appropriation is an indicator for societal interventions into the natural energy flow of (terrestrial) ecosystems. It is defined as the difference between the NPP of hypothetical undisturbed vegetation, and the amount of biomass currently available in ecological cycles (Vitousek et al. 1986). Societies appropriate NPP in two ways: by the prevention of NPP, that is the reduction of the average productivity (NPP per unit area) of ecosystems (e.g. by constructing roads or buildings, or by converting natural ecosystems to high productivity ecosystems with a lower productivity), and by the harvest of biomass (forestry, agriculture).
While hunters and gatherers relied upon the products of photosynthesis, much like any other kind of animal species, the cultural evolution of humanity has seen a tremendous rise in NPP appropriation (see Figure 2). It was achieved by a transformation of natural ecosystems into managed ones, with an increasing number of ecosystem variables being controlled. Agriculture did not generally increase the average productivity in terms of total energy or carbon fixation, but instead, increased the amount that could be harvested. Additionally, areas are ever increasingly used for the construction of buildings or roads at the expense of primary productivity. The NPP appropriation in Austria was investigated in great spatial detail (Haberl 1995). This study showed that human activities, above all agriculture and construction, have significantly lowered the productivity of the vegetation in Austria. The NPP of the actual vegetation (aboveground) is about 7% lower than that of hypothetical undisturbed vegetation. About one half of this is due to construction (ground covered with buildings, roads etc.), the other half is due to agriculture. Additionally, 34% of the potential NPP is harvested, resulting in a total NPP appropriation of 41.5 %. (Figure 4) This is to say that only 59% of the amount of energy which used to be available for food chains in the absence of human society is currently available5.
The reduction of ecological energy flows could be an important cause for the reduction of biodiversity. The so-called species-energy theory (Wright 1983, 1987, 1990) relates the number of species in a region to the amount of available energy. Thus, if energy flow is reduced by NPP appropriation, a reduction of species diversity is the likely result. If the properties of the species-energy curve of Wright (1990) are assumed, the theory predicts that between 5 and 13% of the species in Austria should have become extinct until now. Actual surveys show that 8% of the bird species, 7-14% of the reptiles (but no amphibians) have become extinct in Austria (Bittermann 1990, 1991). The fit of numbers may just be coincidental, of course, but it is clear that the data do not contradict the theory. Further research, based on data with a high spatial resolution will investigate biodiversity patterns in Austria in relation to variations of available energy.
Even if the effect of NPP availability on biodiversity is not yet fully understood, it is obvious that the current level of NPP appropriation constitutes significant intervention into the natural energy flow of ecosystems. NPP appropriation should be regarded as an important indicator for pressures on the environment, if not as a core parameter for sustainable development.
NOTES
1 These numbers do not include the amount of water used to drive the turbines of hydro-electric power plants. If these were included, the numbers would increase by more than a factor of 10.
2 The data reported here refer to 1988 as analysed by Steurer in 1992 and 1994. A more detailed analysis for 1990, based upon in-depth statistics on mining and gravel extraction, arrived at considerably higher amounts of construction materials input (Huttler et al. 1997). These data, though probably more realistic, do not fit into the standard framework of the Austrian Federal Statistical Office, and therefore cannot be presented in time-series, nor be easily compared internationally: Most countries' statistics tend to under-represent the materials used by small construction business (see Huttler et al. 1997,74).
3 Measured in tons of dry matter, for methodological details see Haberl 1995.
4 This calculation is not quite fair insofar as imported materials are only counted by their weight when crossing the national border. In their country of origin, they have left behind a material 'rucksack' (e.g. waste produced during production, transport fuels, etc.). Proportionally, however, exports are counted the same way, and leave behind their ruck-sack in the country under consideration. It has not yet been checked in Austria, though, how these two rucksacks equal out.
5 The appropriation of NPP in Austria is higher than the estimates for global NPP appropriation, ranging from 25 to 39 per cent (Vitousek et al. 1986, Wright 1990). It can be assumed that values for other highly industrialized European countries may be even higher. They typically have less than Austria's 45 per cent forested area, and less territory above 1800 m elevation where no NPP appropriation can be assumed to occur. In other European countries, agricultural areas, roads and buildings are likely to cover an even higher percentage of the surface.
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