Chair of Sustainable Energy and Material Flow Management

Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources

Research Group For Energy and Material Flow Management

Abkürzung der Fakultät für Umwelt und Natürliche Ressourcen "unr" in der Farbe sand auf grünem, kreisförmigen Hintergrund

Materials and energy are needed to build and operate cities, industries, and infrastructure. At the same time, energy supply and material production are major drivers of global environmental crises, including global warming and deforestation.

Our mission is to provide scientific insights on the sustainable supply and use of materials and energy for different levels of economic development, cultures, and lifestyles. Our scenario models and assessment tools identify the most effective supply-side and demand-side strategies for decoupling resource use from human wellbeing. We promote open science and maintain a research portal with a blog, a database, model information, teaching material, and visualisation tools

News

Huge success in Bejing

The 2024 Joint ISIE Socio-Economic Metabolism and Asia-Pacific Conference gathered more than 300 IE researchers

This August saw the biannual SEM section meeting and the ISIE Asia-Pacific Conference, organized by our colleagues and friends at the College of Urban and Environmental Sciences (CUES) at Peking University in Beijing, China, from August 24-27.
Two years had passed since our last section meeting in Vienna in 2022, and now, it was time to reconnect in order to network and present and discuss the latest research in our field.
With more than 300 participants, the conference united a global research community seeking for knowledge-based solutions for a sustainable resource future.

New publication

Material Requirements of Decent Living Standards– by Johan Vélez and Stefan Pauliuk

Decent living standards are practical threshold for the energy, GHG, and material consumption required to alleviate poverty. We quantify the amount of materials in stocks and flows needed to provide DLS to a person. We also estimate which lifestyle and technology choices are effective in providing a DLS without creating an excessive demand for additional materials. To provide a DLS, a material footprint (MF) of 6 t/(cap*yr) and in-use stocks of 43 t/cap are required. These values provide a lower threshold for human material consumption and use.

New publication

Potential for circular economy in the global building sectorr – by Stefan Pauliuk and colleagues

Buildings cause 30% of final energy consumption, 18% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and about 65% of material consumption globally. The circular economy strategies, narrow, slow, and close, together with wooden buildings, can reduce material-related emissions. We find that ambitious CE reduces cumulative 2020-2050 primary material demand from 80 to 30 gigatons (Gt) for cement and from 35 to 15 Gt for steel. 2020-2050 cumulative GHG can be reduced by up to 44%, where the highest contribution comes from the narrow CE strategies, i.e., lower floorspace and lightweight buildings. We conclude that very low carbon emissions trajectories are possible only for combinations of supply and demand-side CE.

Our work was accepted for publication, a link will be provided as soon as the paper is online.

Project Update: CIRCOMOD – EU-funded project on Circular Economy Modelling for Climate Change Mitigation

A big share of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we produce and consume materials. Circular economy aims at reducing natural resource inputs and losses in production and promoting recycling, longer use of products via better design, repair, and remanufacturing. The current scientific models and scenarios for policy making do not include circular economy options. CIRCOMOD will develop a new generation of models that will address this gap.

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Research Update: Model framework development – ODYM and RECC

At Industrial Ecology Freiburg, we work at the forefront of sustainability science. This work involves the development of research infrastructure, including data models, databases, and scenario models for the circular economy. We are committed to open science and share our core model infrastructure and data with the global sustainability science community. A main contribution, ODYM – The Open Dynamic Material Systems Model, is an open source framework for material systems modeling programmed in Python. Our workhorse for scenario modelling for material cycles is RECC, the resource efficiency–climate change mitigation model framework.

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Our main open educational resource: Industrial Ecology Open Online Course (IEooc)

The Industrial Ecology Open Online Course (IEooc) is a collection of online teaching material that documents and explains the core industrial ecology concepts, methods, data, and applications. It serves as guide to new industrial ecology researchers by enabling them to conduct state-of-the-art science for sustainability. The course was developed for university students at all levels.

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Visit our Interactive Research

Our group operates the research portal www.industrialecology.uni-freiburg.de/ to showcase our research and share material with the community. On these pages, we blog about our research and the projects we are involved in, host a database with our research results, share model information and teaching material, and provide visualisation tools.

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