• Energy Research

The human population is rapidly urbanizing, leading many observers to conclude that humans are leaving nature and the countryside behind. This is a perceptual error consistent with the technological optimism inherent in the prevailing expansionist cultural worldview. By contrast, ecological analysis reveals that modern cities are actually increasingly dependent on the goods and services of nature. This fact is merely obscured by technology and urbanization itself. Typical high-income cities appropriate the productive and assimilative capacity of a vast and increasingly global hinterland, resulting in an ‘ecological footprint’ several hundred times larger than the areas they physically occupy. In the next 27 years, the urban population alone is expected to grow by the equivalent of the total human population in the 1930s. This will double the 1970s urban presence on the Earth. Unfortunately, the conventional development path is biophysically unsustainable, calling for a radical transformation of our thinki...

Using an eight-dimensional indicator index, we evaluate the trajectories of resilience of 160 countries over 20 years. Our highly-granular analysis of the current state of the world shows what must happen to control climate change and switch from quantitative to qualitative growth. Assessing the resilience of a country is a complex task prone to opacity and subjectivity. The challenge is to strike a balance between the Earth's biophysical limits and socioeconomic models designed to ignore them. Here we propose a resilience index composed of eight indicators of socioeconomic status (GDP and HDI), natural resources and population (arable land and water resources per capita), energy (supply and renewables), and environmental impacts (greenhouse gas emissions and material footprint). We show that the socioeconomic indicators have improved, while natural resources have been depleting and environmental impacts worsening. We need to reduce the current material footprint 1.5-fold. Average CO2 emissions per capita must drop by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, population growth and political instability seem to undermine resilience score of a country. ; Drs. Bolson and Yutkin were supported through Baseline Research Funding from KAUST to Prof. Patzek

This paper argues that perceptual distortions and prevailing economic rationality, far from encouraging investment in natural capital, actually accelerate the depletion of natural capital stocks. Moreover, conventional monetary analyses cannot detect the problem. This paper therefore makes the case for direct biophysical measurement of relevant stocks and flows, and uses for this purpose the ecological footprint concept. To develop the argument, the paper elaborates the natural capital concept and asserts the need of investing in natural capital to compensate for net losses. It shows how the ecological footprint can be used as a biophysical measure for such capital, and applies this concept as an analytical tool for examining the barriers to investing in natural capital. It picks four issues from a rough taxonomy of barriers and discusses them from an ecological footprint perspective: it shows why marginal prices cannot reflect ecological necessities; how interregional risk pooling encourages resource liquidation; how present terms of trade undermine both local and global ecological stability; and how efficiency strategies may actually accelerate resource throughput. Affirming the necessity of biophysical approaches for exploring the sustainability implications of basic ecological and thermodynamic principles, it draws lessons for current development.

Humanity must commit to transformative change on all levels in order to address the climate emergency and biodiversity collapse. In particular, stabilizing and ultimately reducing the human population size is necessary to ensure the long-term wellbeing of our species and other life on Earth. We show how this transition can be accomplished in an equitable framework that promotes human rights. Specifically, we issue a global appeal for women and men to have at most one child and call for policy-makers to implement population policies that improve education for girls and young women and ensure the availability of high-quality family-planning services.

This paper argues on both theoretical and empirical grounds that, beyond a certain point, there is an unavoidable conflict between economic development (generally taken to mean 'material economic growth') and environmental protection. Think for a moment of natural forests, grasslands, marine estuaries, salt marshes, and coral reefs; and of arable soils, aquifers, mineral deposits, petroleum, and coal. These are all forms of 'natural capital' that represent highly-ordered self-producing ecosystems or rich accumulations of energy/matter with high use potential (low entropy). Now contemplate despoiled landscapes, eroding farmlands, depleted fisheries, anthropogenic greenhouse gases, acid rain, poisonous mine tailings and toxic synthetic compounds. These all represent disordered systems or degraded forms of energy and matter with little use potential (high entropy). The main thing connecting these two states is human economic activity. Ecological economics interprets the environment-economy relationship in terms of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law sees economic activity as a dissipative process. From this perspective, the production of economic goods and services invariably requires the consumption of available energy and matter. To grow and develop, the economy necessarily 'feeds' on sources of high-quality energy/matter first produced by nature. This tends to disorder and homogenize the ecosphere, The ascendance of humankind has consistently been accompanied by an accelerating rate of ecological degradation, particularly biodiversity loss, the simplification of natural systems and pollution. In short, contemporary political rhetoric to the contrary, the prevailing growth-oriented global development paradigm is fundamentally incompatible with long-term ecological and social sustainability. Unsustainability is not a technical nor economic problem as usually conceived, but rather a state of systemic incompatibility between a economy that is a fully-contained, growing, dependent sub-system of a non-growing ecosphere. Potential solutions fly in the face of contemporary development trends and cultural values.

Ecological footprint analysis (EFA) can be used by cities to account for their on-going demands on global renewable resources. To date, EFA has not been fully implemented as an urban policy and planning tool in part due to limitations of local data availability. In this paper we focus on the material consumption component of the urban ecological footprint and identify the ‘component, solid waste life cycle assessment approach’ as one that overcomes data limitations by using data many cities regularly collect: municipal, solid waste composition data which serves as a proxy for material consumption. The approach requires energy use and/or carbon dioxide emissions data from process LCA studies as well as agricultural and forest land data for calculation of a material’s ecological footprint conversion value. We reviewed the process LCA literature for twelve materials commonly consumed in cities and determined ecological footprint conversion values for each. We found a limited number of original LCA studies but were able to generate a range of values for each material. Our set of values highlights the importance for cities to identify both the quantities consumed and per unit production impacts of a material. Some materials like textiles and aluminum have high ecological footprints but make up relatively smaller proportions of urban waste streams than products like paper and diapers. Local government use of the solid waste LCA approach helps to clearly identify the ecological loads associated with the waste they manage on behalf of their residents. This direct connection can be used to communicate to citizens about stewardship, recycling and ecologically responsible consumption choices that contribute to urban sustainability.

When we published Seibert and Rees (2021) [...]