Ulsan conference wrap-up

Dear Section Members

We had a very successful conference at Ulsan last week which many members of our section attended. There were four topics related to socio-economic metabolism and quite a number of sessions with very inspiring contributions by our fellow section members.

Yuichi Moriguchi was awarded the society prize, which is testament of the importance of industrial metabolism research to the industrial ecology scientific community.

At the conference we held a section meeting with about 45 members attending. Most of the board members including Helga Weisz, Daniel Mueller, Shi Lei, Kazuyo Matsubae and Hiroki Tanikawa were also there. We had a good general discussion about the growing recognition of the concept of industrial metabolism in the broader sustainability science community, which can be seen as both a success and a challenge. In the future, it will be very important that we express ownership of our concepts and keep contributing to the rise of their broader acceptance.

We also discussed the location for the 2014 section conference. A large majority suggested that the next conference should be held in the Asia-Pacific region to mirror our section’s global reach. We discussed the possibility of holding our section conference back-to-back with the next Asia-Pacific and Input-Output meetings. I was asked to develop a proposal to host the next conference in Brisbane, Australia for the section board to review and to make a final decision. It was agreed that the next conference should be scheduled for the first week of September in 2014.

We also discussed next steps for a section website and will keep you posted on this.

It was a great pleasure catching up with so many of you at Ulsan and I hope you all had a comfortable trip home. I look forward seeing you again at the GRC in Italy and/or at the next SEM conference.

Best regards,
Heinz