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The Assessing Global Resource Use report by the UN is finally out!
And it couldn’t have come at
a better time. I was starting to worry that all these ‘footprints’ I’ve been
tracking and linking to consumption aren’t useful in practice. I was wrong.
This report assesses how material resources are being used across the world, and crucially – how a solid understanding of this can lead to targeted policy making. They site resource efficiency as one of the key drivers of sustainability, but they also recognize the importance of a circular economy (more on this later). In all my excitement I read the whole report, but it’s quite long so I’ll direct you to several sections I found particularly interesting.
Page 13: Notice policy #1 – do you think any of the
footprint metrics we’ve seen can be used to set targets and measure progress?
Page 33: Box 2.1 reads: “trade leads
to a redistribution of environmental burdens towards resource-extracting and
producing countries”. Does the evidence we have been investigating support this
statement? I think so.
Page 38: They’ve reached the same conclusions by using DMC!
Page 51: Take a look at Table 3.1 in particular, these are practical policy instruments to tackle material use, water, and biodiversity loss
issues.
Page 77: A case study of how
targeted strategies can deliver basic services to 7 million additional people
while consuming 5% less electricity and cement. This would avoid over 22% GHG
and PM2.5 emissions. How was this quantified? By using a footprint approach that recognizes the global reach of GHG emissions.
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