Ecological resource availability: A method to estimate resource budgets for a sustainable economy

Abstract

Non-technical summary Resources are the basis of our economy and their provision causes major shares of the global environmental burdens, many of which are beyond safe limits today. In order to be sustainable, our economy needs to be able to operate within those boundaries. As resources are the physical ‘currency’ of our economy, we present a method that allows translating Earth system boundaries into resource budgets. This ecological resource availability determines the global annual production of a resource that can be considered absolutely sustainable. The budgets can be managed like financial budgets, bringing absolute environmental limits one step closer to decision-makers. Technical summary In this paper, we propose a new method translating Earth system boundaries into resource budgets. These Earth system boundaries are represented by 10 variables from the planetary boundaries framework and one additional boundary for renewable energy potentials. This follows the idea that, in a sustainable economy, resources are not limited by their physical and/or geopolitical availability, but rather by the environmental impacts caused due to their utilization. The method is designed to estimate how much of a specific resource can be provided to the society within Earth system boundaries, taking into account impacts caused by primary production and end-of-life treatment. For the calculation, it is necessary to specify how global boundaries are allocated to the various resources and the acceptable risk of boundary violation. The method considers multiple boundary dimensions and can therefore effectively avoid burden shifting. We calculate the ecological resource availability (ERA) for major metals. We find that, in the current forms of production (state-of-the-art processes), the current share of production (i.e., resource mix) and when allocating the global boundaries according to the same share of impacts caused by these resources today (grandfathering principle), the ERA budgets are 40 times smaller than production volumes in 2016. Social media summary Resource budgets in accordance with the Earth system boundaries enable the management of our planetary household.