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Socioeconomic Metabolism and the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production: What Promise Do They Hold for LTSER?

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Book cover Long Term Socio-Ecological Research

Part of the book series: Human-Environment Interactions ((HUEN,volume 2))

Abstract

This chapter reviews approaches to analysing the ‘metabolism’ of socioeconomic systems consistently across space and time. Socioeconomic metabolism refers to the material, substance or energy throughput of socioeconomic systems, i.e. all the biophysical resources required for production, consumption, trade and transportation. We also introduce the broader concept of socio-ecological metabolism, which additionally considers human-induced changes in material, substance or energy flows in ecosystems. An indicator related to this broader approach is the human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP). We discuss how these approaches can be used to analyse society-nature interaction at different spatial and temporal scales, thereby representing one indispensible part of the methodological tool box of LTSER. These approaches are complimentary to other methods from the social sciences and humanities, as well as to genuinely transdisciplinary approaches. Using Austria’s sociometabolic transition from agrarian to industrial society from 1830 to 2000 as an example, we demonstrate the necessity of including a comprehensive stock-flow framework in order to use the full potential of the socio-ecological metabolism approach in LTSER studies. We demonstrate how this approach can be implemented in integrated socio-ecological models that can improve understanding of changes in society-nature interrelations through time, another highly important objective of LTSER.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Agricultural fields are excluded from the definition of society’s biophysical stocks even though they are produced and maintained by human labour, for accounting reasons, among others. For a detailed discussion on conceptual and methodological considerations, see Fischer-Kowalski and Weisz (1999) and Eurostat (2007).

  2. 2.

    Water and air together comprise 85–90% of all total material input. In order not to drown other “economically valued” materials in water and air, the latter are excluded from MFA. Another reason for their exclusion is the low environmental impact of their use, a supposition which is now beginning to be questioned in the context of discussions on ecosystem services (see http://www.teebweb.org/).

  3. 3.

    For example, converting natural ecosystems to cropland increases HANPP. Increasing yields per unit area and year or reducing losses in the production chain allows the HANPP per unit of final product to be reduced and therefore HANPP to be ‘decoupled’ from supply of food or other land-dependent products.

  4. 4.

    Gridded HANPP data can be freely downloaded at http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/socec/inhalt/1191.htm

  5. 5.

    HANPP studies are not restricted to terrestrial ecosystems, but can also be used to analyse trends, trajectories and the magnitude of human impacts on e.g. marine ecosystems (Pauly et al. 2005; Swartz et al. 2010). The utility of these approaches in LTSER has so far not been explored.

  6. 6.

    Note that before 1918 the current territory of Austria was part of the much larger Austro-Hungarian monarchy. For this period, we were obliged to use data that refer to a territory that is similar, but not exactly identical to Austria’s current territory. These data were used to extrapolate to Austria in its current boundaries, in order to generate a consistent time series (see Krausmann and Haberl 2007for detail).

  7. 7.

    Free software is readily available, for example Vensim, http://www.vensim.com/

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Acknowledgments

This chapter has profited from research funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), project P20812-G11, by the Austrian Ministry of Science within the research programme proVISION, and from the FP7 Project Volante. It contributes to the Global Land Project (http://www.globallandproject.org) and to long-term socio-ecological research (LTSER) initiatives within LTER Europe (http://www.lter-europe.ceh.ac.uk/).

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  1. Institute of Social Ecology Vienna (SEC), Alpen-Adria Universitaet Klagenfurt, Wien, Graz, Schottenfeldgasse 29/5, Vienna, 1070, Austria

    Helmut Haberl Ph.D., Karl-Heinz Erb Ph.D., Veronika Gaube Ph.D., Simone Gingrich Ph.D. & Simron Jit Singh Ph.D.

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  1. Helmut Haberl Ph.D.
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  2. Karl-Heinz Erb Ph.D.
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Correspondence to Helmut Haberl Ph.D. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Klagenfurt, Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies (I, Institute of Social Ecology, Schottenfeldgasse 29/5, Vienna, 1070, Austria

    Simron Jit Singh

  2. University of Klagenfurt, Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies (I, Institute of Social Ecology, Schottenfeldgasse 29/5, Vienna, 1070, Austria

    Helmut Haberl

  3. Yale University, Yale School of Forestry and Environmenta, Center for Industrial Ecology, Edwards Street 380, New Haven, 06511, Connecticut, USA

    Marian Chertow

  4. , Ecosystem Research and Monitoring, Federal Environment Agency, Spittelauer Lände 5, Vienna, 1090, Austria

    Michael Mirtl

  5. University of Klagenfurt, Faculty for Interdisciplinary Studies (I, Institute of Social Ecology, Schottenfeldgasse 29/5, Vienna, 1070, Austria

    Martin Schmid

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Haberl, H., Erb, KH., Gaube, V., Gingrich, S., Singh, S.J. (2013). Socioeconomic Metabolism and the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production: What Promise Do They Hold for LTSER?. In: Singh, S., Haberl, H., Chertow, M., Mirtl, M., Schmid, M. (eds) Long Term Socio-Ecological Research. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1177-8_2

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