lovesouthernsocial.com

Study shows that development is still not that sustainable

Image: Confap

We have been talking about sustainable development for a long time, as the urgent situation on the planet has reached such a point that we can no longer ignore the environmental impacts caused by ourselves. And sustainability has become a central theme always based on economic and technological development projects. The trend of sustainable practices would be to decouple the use of natural resources from economic growth, and by the calculations this seemed to be working, but a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that the type of calculation being used did not provided the actual amount of raw material spent by each country.

One of the calculation tools most commonly used by international organizations and some governmental institutions is the Domestic Consumption Material (DMC), which only considers the volume of raw material extracted and used domestically and also the volume of material physically exported. One of the current goals is to achieve the complete decoupling of the use of natural resources from economic growth, in order to achieve maximum sustainable development, and according to these indicators, we would be moving towards this goal.

The study carried out by researchers from three universities revealed, however, the omission of important data in these indicators. They developed a new model, more comprehensive and capable of mapping the flow of raw materials around the world. One of the reasons for the need for new indicators is international trade, on which developed countries depend for obtaining natural resources. But, many times, these resources do not leave their countries of origin because there are industries that use raw materials in the countries where the branches are located and only export the final product, unbalancing the statistics.

The researcher who led the study, Tommy Wiedmann, said that we are consuming raw materials at a level never seen before, and the results confirm that there has been no decline in demand for resources in relation to economic growth, and this is a warning that, with these new indicators, governments can take appropriate action.

Using what they call “material footprint” (material footprint), that is, the amount of natural resources used or produced by a country, the research considered metallic ores, biomass, fossil fuels and construction minerals for the new calculation. From this, it was discovered that, in 2008, China was the country that had the largest "material footprint" (MF) in absolute values, but, in an international context, the US is the largest importer of resources, and China, the largest exporter. Australia had the highest MF per capita, reaching 35 tonnes per person. And in all industrialized countries, MF grew together with GDP, contrary to what the DMC indicator showed, that is, there was no effective application of sustainable development. South Africa was the only country that actually managed to decouple resource dependence from economic development.

Source: Phys.org