Last month we saw a pretty full schedule of meetings
starting with the section
conference in Darmstadt, Germany 26–28 September, followed by the ISIE Asia-Pacific conference in Beijing, China
19–20 October and the World
Resources Forum also in Beijing, China on 20–22 October.
At the Darmstadt conference Daniel Mueller led a section
meeting which identified priority research topics including (in no particular
order) sustainable resource management, material stock analysis, the analysis
of supply chains and industrial material flows and complex networks that
underpin them. Participants flagged the need to improve our research
community’s analytical skills in the direction of modelling and scenario
analysis, studying embodied material flows and developing ways to disaggregate
material flows to economic sectors. None of these topics are really new but
progress has been limited for quite some time. The participants also called for
metabolism research to be part of integrated analysis including building
linkages to the carbon and climate research. Most impertinently, participants
recognised the need to link our research findings with decision making in
public policy and business planning enabled through a better understanding of
the institutions that steer industrial metabolism embedded in an understanding
of the political economy of material use. Not everyone of course participated
in the session at Darmstadt and I’d like to encourage you to add to or comment
on the list. You can do this using the comment function in this blog.
The 3rd Asia-Pacific meeting brought together an
interesting mix of senior people of our society and a large number of students,
mainly from China. I attended a plenary discussion on how to cope with emerging
supply shortages of certain materials and was surprised by how our response to
this problem is framed by what I would call engineering intuition with an
almost complete absence of thinking about the sociological factors that
underpin the capacity of society and policy to address such fundamental changes
linked to our industrial metabolism. I was also very impressed by the quality
of the Chinese students’ presentations, which were all well framed, data rich,
analytically exquisite and presented in very good English. Our connection with
first class students is a promising resource for the future of ISIE and our
section.
The World Resources Forum was a very large meeting with many
parallel sessions and it is hard to do the gathering justice with seeing only a
very small segment of the whole. If you would like to get an idea of what was
presented please visit the conference website at www.worldresourcesforum.org/WRF-2012,
which includes lots of information, photos from the meeting, and reports from
the student reporters who attended the conference.
There is a draft summary of the meeting by the co-chairs
available at www.worldresourcesforum.org/files/file/Draft%20chairman%E2%80%99s%20summary%20highlight%20version%20Oct%2023.pdf
Heinz Schandl
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