The research group “Global Resource Use” (GRU) is one of the leading groups worldwide in quantifying society’s use of natural resources and its consequences. Operating in a worldwide network of around 80 partner institutions, GRU is working at the cutting edge of ongoing sustainability debates to better inform policy makers in their design of policy options for a sustainable future. Natural resources like raw materials, land or water are the basis for our society and economy. However, the way we currently use these resources is causing severe ecological impacts, contributing to the planetary crisis, including climate change and biodiversity loss. To meet our sustainability goals, we need to drastically reduce resource use. But how can we get there?

First, we need data and tools to quantify and monitor the use of natural resources by products, economic sectors and countries. Our research group wWe develops methods to assess for the spatially explicit assessment of resource flows along international supply chains. This allows us to and trace commodities from the location of resource extraction, e.g. a mine or a crop field, all the way to the final consumers. We also study the environmental impacts such as deforestation associated with international trade. and related environmental and social impacts from the location of production to distant consumers (see the ERC project FINEPRINT). By that means, we are able to identify hotspot sectors, products and consumption areas where action is needed most to prevent or mitigate environmental impactssupport a transition towards a low-carbon circular economy. To promote empirical assessments and international policy processes, we maintain UN Environment’s Global Raw Material Flows Database and consult the OECD in its attempt to harmonize methodologies on consumption-based resource accounting. Moreover, we inform sustainability policy makers and the interested public byBy providing state-of-the-art onlinevisualisation tools, analytics and visulatisations, such as www.materialflows.net and SCP-HAT. Our data and tools allow to monitor progress towards the realization of the UN SDGs as well as towe support the design of target-oriented policies and the transition towards a sustainable and low-carbon future.

Want to learn more/get started?

Check out our online tools materialflows.net to learn more about global flows of raw materials or scp-hat.lifecycleinitiative.org to analyse hotspots of unsustainable consumption and production.

Researchers

Martin Bruckner

Elizaveta Buriak

Martin Cerny

Jakob Gutschlhofer

Olivia Hinz

Julia Kreimel

Andreas Kroiss

Sebastian Luckeneder

Stephan Lutter

Siwar Alvaro Ortiz-Guzman

Lukas Sattler

Victor Wegner-Maus

Projects

• BAMBOO: Biodiversity and trade: mitigating the impacts of non-food biomass global supply chains 

• REDUCE: Energy-efficient decarbonization through clean technologies 

• Global deforestation impacts of Europe's metal and coal consumption 

• Layers of natural resource extraction 

• FINEPRINT: Spatially explicit material footprints: Fine-scale assessment of Europe's global environmental and social impacts