2015 Discussion Paper 2
17 decoupling, i.e. an absolute reduction in the amounts of natural resources consumed, waste and
emissions even in the face of growth in economic activity, very rarely occurs in practice. Absolute decoupling occurs when the causes and consequences of a problem are well understood, when
something can be done to resolve the problem, and when there is willingness among key stakeholders and constituencies to overcome barriers to effective change and to act upon the
problem through the wide-scale promotion of appropriate decoupling policies and technologies
9
. This has been the case for certain air pollutants where the relationship between pollution and
environmental and health impacts were well established, filter technologies had been available, and policymakers and businesses were ready to implement the necessary technologies to respond to the
concern and demand expressed by the general public. It is important to mention that the relationship between economic activity measured by gross
domestic product
– GDP and human well-being is not straightforward, as outcomes for well-being can vary at similar levels of GDP. While it is difficult to measure human well-being directly and there
are only very limited commonly agreed upon human well-being indicators
10
that are reported on a regular basis, recent results from multidimensional well-being indices at the national level suggest
that both subjective and objective measures of well-being as well as sub-indices of environmental sustainability do not correlate well with GDP as a measure of economic activity. For instance, in the
case of the Canadian Index of Well-being CIW the growth rate of the national GDP for the last twenty years is consistently higher than any other social well-being or environmental sustainability
measures
11
. There is a growing body of work on subjective measures for well-being including indicators for happiness which have not, however, reached the level of scientific agreement
necessary for policy relevant indicators but may well do so in the years to come.
3.6 Information on available data sets and databases, and costsefforts required for
augmenting these There are a number of global data sets for material use which increasingly agree with regards to
their information of usage of biomass, fossil fuels, ores and industrial minerals and construction minerals both at the global level and country by country. The main data providers are the Vienna
University of Business and Economics which operates a database covering the period 1980 to 2010 available at www.materialflows.net and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organisation CSIRO of Australia covering the period 1970 to 2008 for two world regions, namely Asia and the Pacific at www. csiro.auAsiaPacificResourceFlows and Latin America and the
Caribbean at www.csiro.auLatinAmericaCaribbeanResourceFlows. The Institute of Social Ecology in Vienna has, in addition, produced a 100 year time series of global material use Krausmann et al.
2009. A recent comparison of data sets in Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2012 found a high level of coherence
between different data providers which speaks for the robustness and reliability of the available data for material use at the national economy level. The high level of agreement among data from
different data providers is a result of the methodological efforts and guidance that has been provided by the European Statistical Office EUROSTAT through a number of guidebooks that have
oriented the generation of data sets in research institutes and statistical offices around the globe.
9
These decoupling policies and technologies are the focus of the Decoupling in Practice Decoupling 2 report of UNEP International Resource Panel to be published in June 2014
10
Such indicator is for example the human development index HDI measuring literacy, life expectancy and wealth; for details see http:hdr.undp.orgenstatisticshdi
11
https:uwaterloo.cacanadian-index-wellbeingsitesca.canadian-index- wellbeingfilesuploadsfilesCIW2012-HowAreCanadiansReallyDoing-23Oct2012_0.pdf
2015 Discussion Paper 2
18 The most advanced material flow data available for Europe is provided by EUROSTAT. There are two
online data sets, one hosted by UNEP and other by CSIRO for Asia and the Pacific and for Latin America and the Caribbean see above.
Another important data source is the EXIOBASE database see at www.exiobase.eu, a global, and multi-regional environmentally extended input-output framework which includes environmental
satellites for emissions and resource extractions by industry. The international input-output table provided by EXIOBASE can be used for the analysis of the environmental impacts associated with the
final consumption of product groups in a country or a group of countries. UNEP s I te atio al Resource Panel has commissioned an assessment study on global material
flows and resource productivity with the aim of harmonizing the currently available global data sets and agreeing on one data set. From the available studies global material use is known to have grown
from 14 billion tons in 1950 to over 70 billion tons in 2010 see Figure 1a. Analysing the data, it becomes clear that material efficiency at the country-level improved
