Research
We design scenarios for sustainable futures and feed them into material cycle models that tell us how human needs drive energy and material use and the environmental impacts associated with material production and energy supply. We want to understand how human needs satisfaction can effectively be decoupled from environmental impacts by quantifying the economy-wide impact of different policy measures, such as resource efficiency strategies (circular economy), regulatory measures, economic incentives, urban forms, different levels of societal inequality, and sufficiency strategies.
The scope of our work covers the distribution of service consumption across societal groups, the transformation of the built environment and the services it provides, the circular economy of mass materials (steel, concrete, wood, plastics, copper), and the calculation of major footprints (energy, materials, GHG, water, land). Our research is part of the cross-disciplinary fields industrial ecology and socio-metabolic research.
Our research contributes to a comprehensive understanding of the sustainability potential of the different supply and demand-side strategies for sustainability. Our scenarios help identify effective policy levers for decoupling human wellbeing from resource use and environmental destruction.
To disseminate the results of our work to a wide audience, including policy makers, consultants, industry organisations, NGOs, the general public, and the global scientific community, we maintain an Open Science Portal with a blog, a database of our research results, information on our models, extensive educational material, and interactive visualization tools. The publications of the members of our group show the different case studies, concept developments, and collaborations that we are part of.
Our group members are active in different roles in the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE), our global network of researchers. Open positions in our group are published on the ISIE job board.
