Monitoring domestic material consumption at lower territorial levels: A novel data downscaling method
Date
2020-10Keywords
Economy-Wide Material flow analysis (EW-MFA)
Domestic Material Consumption (DMC)
Circular Economy
Social metabolism
Regional MFA
Industrial ecology
Abstract
The availability of harmonized and granular information is critical for the design of place‐sensitive policies toward more sustainable economies. However, accessibility to disaggregated data at subnational levels remains an exception in many geographies and policy domains. In this article, we develop a novel three‐stage—specification, optimization, extrapolation (SOE)—econometric approach to infer harmonized regional level estimates from broadly available socioeconomic data. The approach is tested by estimating domestic material consumption (DMC) in more than 280 European regions (at NUTS 2 level). Unlike previous methods based on similar econometric techniques, our method makes explicit the socio‐metabolic profiles of subnational territories by estimating and applying country‐specific elasticities. Our DMC estimates are consistent with those obtained by ad hoc material flow studies that could be accessed for a sample of regions. The SOE method presented in this paper provides decision ...
Type
journal article