Monitoring domestic material consumption at subnational level. Enabling the territorial perspective

Abstract

Searching for sustainable modes of consumption and production represents nowadays the only way to meet an ever-increasing demand of goods without incurring in further environmental deterioration. The growing awareness that “business as usual” is both, unwise and unsustainable, has placed the role of the environment and the efficient use of natural resources at the centre of political and economic strategies. At the same time, mitigation strategies and monitoring
frameworks geared to sustainability are generally implemented at national or supranational levels, failing short in providing significant guidance for local policy makers. The need of granular data and, therefore, the adoption of a territorial perspective in the analysis of resource consumption patterns has been the main motivation for this thesis. The dearth of studies at subnational level
constitutes a critical research gap not only to recognise the needs and opportunities reflecting the unique features of regions, but also because the regional scale is often considered as the optimal level of governance for planning, coordinating and assessing actions towards sustainable developments.
This thesis provides a methodology for scaling national environmental indicators to lower levels considering territorial heterogeneity, going far beyond the simplistic approaches that provide granular data based on, for example, per capita values. At the same time, the methodology remains sufficiently systematized to be applied to large datasets and different indicators. Specifically, our methodology is applied (and validated) to downscale the Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) indicator. DMC, which measures the direct consumption of material by an economy, is a prime example of an environmental indicator only delivered at national level, but strictly tied to specific territorial configurations. One of the outcomes of this thesis is to provide DMC figures for more than 280 European regions from 2006 to 2015. This database represents a critical input to expand the understanding on the complex relationship between resource consumption, territorial contexts and socioeconomic drivers. The analysis highlights the existence of a significant technological gap between urban and rural regions, the latter struggling the most to recover from economic
crises and to retain human capital. Going further, a closer inspection on the impacts of socioeconomic drivers on resource efficiency across different regional economic structures, reveals that increased access to capital would generate higher resource efficiency returns in material-intensive economies, compared with service-based economies. Differently, increased agglomeration levels represent the best resource efficiency leverage across urban, service-based,
territories. Overall, the thesis brings into discussion a renewed interest for the consideration of territorial aspects for a better understanding of the dialectics between the underlying forces driving regional resource efficiency and the different opportunities and challenges that regions might face according to their specific endowments.

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidad del País Vasco (UPV/EHU)
Supervisor	Ikerne del Valle (Supervisor) & Tapia Garcia (Supervisor)