Quantifying material stocks in long-lived products: research frontiers for sustainable resource-use strategies

Abstract

Material stocks in long-lived products require >50% of annual global resource extraction for their construction and maintenance, and lock in energy and other dissipative resource-use through their technical and geospatial characteristics. Robust data on material stocks are thus fundamental to informing sustainable resource-use strategies. Yet, quantifying stocks remains challenging and bears considerable uncertainties. Different estimates of the same material stocks scrutinized for this review differ by up to two orders of magnitude, illustrating a still weak scientific basis for policy and planning. Disparities arise from differing system boundaries, methodology, data sources, definitions, and lack of data to represent the diversity of material stock types. To robustly inform sustainable resource-use strategies, the scientific and practitioners community should systematically assess and report sensitivity and uncertainty, and reduce the latter through transparent documentation, model intercomparisons, consensus and open-access databases, enhanced data collection, and comprehensive quantification of material stocks.

Keywords: material flow analysis, sustainable resource management, uncertainty analysis, socioeconomic metabolism, material stocks