Background: The responsibility for a sustainable handling and management of natural resources is indispensable for providing the needs of a growing and affluent population and at once to safeguard the environment. Particularly, the EU’s growth strategy for a smart, inclusive and sustainable economy (Europe 2020 strategy) supports a shift towards sustainable growth via a resource-efficient, low-carbon economy. Further, the move “Towards a Circular Economy” is supported by measures driving a more efficient use of resources and waste minimization.
At present, the resource efficiency indicators available in the Eurostat scoreboard represent the evolution of the relation of gross domestic product (GDP) with different inputs such as energy, water, land or material resources (including biomass and minerals). Biomass production (food, feed, fiber, fuels – 4Fs) is the result of the use of the interconnected resources soils/sediments, water and energy. This nexus of resources is not accounted as such in the indicators. Further, there is still at the moment a “conceptual gap” in the method for accounting of biomass in the “resource efficiency”, as most of it is produced by humans. The relations between the production of biomass and the use of the soil-water-energy nexus need further investigations.
Goal: The goal is to understand the links between the consumption of our societies and the use of natural resources like the SSW system services: the need is to quantify and map in time and space the use of the nexus of SSW and energy resources related to the final consumption of products and services.
Rationale from the themes: Demand: The demand for the goods and services provided by natural resources is driven by the total final consumption of our societies. So far, the demand for bio-sourced products (4Fs) particularly is indirectly a demand for SSW system services.
Natural Capital: Natural capital provides the society with a wide range of goods and services, which are often considered to be free of charge. A steady supply of all these services is only guaranteed if the environment is healthy and if ecological structures and functions are preserved. These conditions need to be embodied in the assessment of the efficiency of the use of the SSW-energy nexus.
Land Management: Important role of land management is to balance the demand for and supply of resources and natural capital in urban and rural areas. Land management includes the institutional capacity of local, regional and national governments to identify and protect vulnerable areas and resources, ensure long-term productive potential of agricultural land, enhance adaptation to the climate change and to provide strategies to reduce the urban sprawl, as well as to reuse degraded, derelict or abandoned sites into new function.
Net Impact: The provision of many ecosystem services is interlinked with each other and/or linked to biodiversity, land use and land use change to increase the productivity of ecosystems is inevitable coupled with ecological, economic and societal impacts on global, EU and local scale as well as on different temporal scales.
So what? Most of the competencies of territorial authorities (national, regional, local) are organized by domain (e.g. water, agriculture, urban planning, tourism). These authorities would beneficiate from a more global and informed vision of the utility (private and public) of their decisions if they were supplied with indicators helping to measure the consequences of their decisions on the natural resources. In the future, this “footprint” type of indicators will permit the statistical scoreboard to be complemented to analyze the environmental impacts through the whole global economic cycle and thus to better balance the societal benefits and ecological effects of different resource-use options.
Links to other fields: This IT can be part of researches on more complete resource nexus (water-energy-food, minerals-water-energy, water-energy-minerals-food-land).