Lecture

Material Flow Analysis for Resource Management

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In course

ENV-501: Material flow analysis and resource management

This course provides the basis to understand material and energy production and consumption processes. Students learn how to develop a material flow analysis and apply it to resource management cases. They analyze the implications of their models on resour ...

Description

This lecture introduces Material Flow Analysis (MFA) as a tool for bridging disciplines and policy making. It covers the need to improve the interpretation of MFA results, the importance of linking MFA with social science methods, and examples like pesticide use in Colombia and phosphorus management in Switzerland. The lecture explores how MFA results can be linked with the social system, focusing on regulatory mechanisms, agent analysis, and material flow analysis. It also discusses the necessity of analyzing actors in steering MFA systems and the utility of combining MFA with social science methods through examples. The lecture concludes by emphasizing the importance of considering scale and agent composition when selecting social science methods.

Instructors (4)

Aristide Henri Roger Athanassiadis

Aristide has a joint-PhD in Urbanism from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and The University of Melbourne on the topic of comprehensive urban environmental assessments. Since 2018, he was co-Chair of Circular Economy and Urban Metabolism at the Université Libre de Bruxelles where he advised local administrations on the regional circular economy plan and facilitated exchanges between researchers, policy makers and practitioners in order to develop projects that helped Brussels' economy and metabolism transition towards a more circular state. During the last years, he has collaborated and worked with/for several universities, research centres, environmental administrations, NGOs, youth organisations and consultancy firms on a great variety of projects around the topics of urban metabolism and circular economy. Finally, Aristide co-created the non-profit organisation and open-source initiative Metabolism of Cities (www.metabolismofcities.org) that aims to bring to create, share and apply urban metabolism knowledge, in policy and practice.

Vincent Moreau

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer

Claudia R. Binder, a Swiss, Canadian and Colombian citizen, was born in Montreal and spent most of her childhood in Switzerland and Colombia. She studied at ETH Zurich from 1985 to 1996, earning a degree in biochemistry and then a PhD in environmental sciences. After conducting her post-doctoral research at the University of Maryland in the US from 1996 to 1998, she returned to Switzerland and took a position as a senior research scientist at ETH Zurich, studying the interaction between human and environmental systems at the Institute for Natural and Social Science Interface. In 2006, Binder joined the University of Zurich as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, and in 2009 moved to the University of Graz in Austria where she served as a full professor of systems science. In 2011, she took a position at the University of Munich’s Department of Geography as a full professor of human-environment relations. Binder joined EPFL in March 2016 and set up the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS) at ENAC; she also holds the La Mobilière Chair on Urban Ecology and Sustainable Living. Her research involves analyzing, modelling and assessing the transition of urban systems towards sustainability. She looks in particular at how we can better understand the dynamics of urban metabolism, what characterizes a sustainable city, and what drives and hinders transformation processes. She does so by combining knowledge from social, natural and data science. Her research focuses on food, energy, and sustainable living and transport in urban systems. In Switzerland, Binder was appointed to the Research Council, Programs Division of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in 2016 and serves on the Steering Committee of the SNSF’s National Research Program 71, “Managing Energy Consumption” and the Swiss Competence Centers for Energy Research (SCCER). She is also a member of the Steering Board on Sustainability Research for the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the University Council of the University of Munich (LMU). At EPFL, Binder is the academic director of Design Together, a cross-disciplinary teaching initiative. She was appointed to the management team of the Energy Center in 2018 and as head of the working group on EPFL’s energy and sustainability strategy in 2019.

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Related concepts (32)

Policy analysis

Policy analysis or public policy analysis is a technique used in the public administration sub-field of political science to enable civil servants, nonprofit organizations, and others to examine and evaluate the available options to implement the goals of laws and elected officials. People who regularly use policy analysis skills and techniques on the job, particularly those who use it as a major part of their job duties are generally known by the title Policy Analyst.

Policy

Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an organization. Policies can assist in both subjective and objective decision making. Policies used in subjective decision-making usually assist senior management with decisions that must be based on the relative merits of a number of factors, and as a result, are often hard to test objectively, e.

Discretionary policy

In macroeconomics, discretionary policy is an economic policy based on the ad hoc judgment of policymakers as opposed to policy set by predetermined rules. For instance, a central banker could make decisions on interest rates on a case-by-case basis instead of allowing a set rule, such as Friedman's k-percent rule, an inflation target following the Taylor rule, or a nominal income target to determine interest rates or the money supply. In practice, most policy actions are discretionary in nature.

Public policy

Public policy is an institutionalized proposal or a decided set of elements like laws, regulations, guidelines, and actions to solve or address relevant and real-world problems, guided by a conception and often implemented by programs. The implementation of public policy is known as public administration. Public policy can be considered to be the sum of a government's direct and indirect activities and has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. They are created and/or enacted on behalf of the public typically by a government.

Monetary policy

Monetary policy is the policy adopted by the monetary authority of a nation to affect monetary and other financial conditions to accomplish broader objectives like high employment and price stability (normally interpreted as a low and stable rate of inflation). Further purposes of a monetary policy may be to contribute to economic stability or to maintain predictable exchange rates with other currencies.

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