Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SANDLINKS (Framing sand sustainability in a telecoupled world)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2019-10-01 do 2021-09-30
Humanity is using natural resources at an unprecedented scale. Global raw material extraction grew by 94% between 1980 and 2010 to reach a total of 70 Bt per year in 2010, and is predicted to reach 100 Bt by 2030. Sand and gravel are the most extracted group of materials worldwide. The construction industry is behind this huge demand. Sand is critical for concrete, land-reclamation projects or combating coastal erosion. Despite enormous advances being made to understand and quantify the footprint of human infrastructure, the “off-site” impacts derived from the provision of construction minerals are largely ignored. An ever-increasing demand for these resources is putting more and more strain on limited deposits, which has led to conflicts around the world and will likely lead to “tragedies of the sand commons” if sustainable mining cannot be achieved. The SANDLINKS project is addressing this important yet neglected crisis. The project aims to understand how an increasing demand for sand affects complex human-nature dynamics and connects with environmental and sustainability challenges through mining, transportation, trade, and consumption. The project applies and operationalizes a systems integration approach, the telecoupling framework, and conducts studies at multiple scales to strengthen the knowledge base and contribute to develop possible pathways into a sustainable management and governance of construction minerals. This research combines research methods such as evidence synthesis, material flow analysis, and agent-based modeling.
During the outgoing phase of the SANDLINKS project at Michigan State University, the conceptual framework on the linkages among sand use, environmental, social, and economic dimensions was established. The framework was published in the One Earth journal in 2021. In it, the research team introduced the idea of transitions in sand production from subsistence mining toward larger-scale regional supply systems that include mega-quarries for crushed rock, marine dredging, and recycled secondary materials. Those transitions are being examined and tested in two case studies in Mexico and China, where successful collaborations with local partners have been established, including the co-supervision of students. At the case-study level, a mix-method approach is being applied to understand how changes in sand demand and policies affect human-nature dynamics. In addition, this phase of the project developed the first two systematic overviews on the impacts of construction minerals mining on biodiversity and on conflicts of human-environmental justice globally. Two spatially-explicit databases have been produced as a result of these works and will be published during the last year of the project.
Construction aggregates - sand, gravel, and crushed rock - are the overlooked raw materials of the Anthropocene. They make up the biggest share of the world’s human-made mass, which outweighed all of Earth’s living biomass in 2020. With a global market valued at around US$ 390 Billion in 2020, aggregates are the world’s most extracted solid materials by mass. Their annual consumption is predicted to double by 2060, exerting further pressure on threatened ecosystems, triggering social conflicts, and fueling concerns over sand shortages.
A drastic problem calls for drastic solutions – truly doing things differently to put aside problems and create pathways to sustainability. The SANDLINKS project articulates a new perspective on the global sand sustainability debate. Over the last decades, scientists have developed approaches for thinking through how disparate phenomena are connected over space and time (so-called ‘telecouplings’); such as how a change in policy in one place can have unexpected impacts somewhere else. Simultaneously, industrial ecologists have developed methods to quantify and visualize the metabolism of society through inflows of materials and energy from the environment (so-called ‘physical economy’). The first part of the project developed the framework that connects these different branches of sustainability science and shines a new light on the world’s consumption of sand, looking at pathways for preventing and alleviating ‘sand crises’. Instead of looking at components such as geology, logistics, environment, or policy in isolation, this approach looks at the entire sand-supply network to gain a holistic understanding of the stresses on both nature and people across time and space. According to this framework, using sand resources in a way that delivers sustainable prosperity hinges on a good understanding of the physical dimension of sand-supply networks (their backbone), their environmental and socioeconomic impacts across scales and sites (their outcomes), and ultimately on how people decide how, how much, and which materials to use (their brain).
Following this perspective, the research in the project has introduced three major new ideas: 1) Sand-supply networks exhibit complex system properties that can be tracked through the evolution of physical material stocks and flows over time. Non-linear demand is strongly influenced by legacy effects such as the nature of existing production facilities and infrastructure stocks in the built environment or regulatory environments that entail lock-in effects into carbon-intensive pathways. Feedbacks between supply and demand are driven by resource constraints and consumer choices, spillovers and leakages, climate change, and risks of biological invasions. 2) Sand-supply networks change in the face of disruptions from small-scale artisanal mining relying mostly on common-pool resources towards larger-scale regional supply systems that include mega quarries for crushed rock, marine dredging, and the recycling of construction and demolition waste. 3) Transition pathways do not necessarily result in the greening of production because they depend on factors such as resource availability, capital, and technology to exploit resources or implement management and monitoring. For example, a transition from river mining to crushed rock production risks displacing impacts towards air pollution and water consumption. The main implication is that ignoring sand-supply networks’ complexity can result in unsustainable “solutions”, including problem shifts and unintended consequences of regulations.
The framework of sand-supply networks and the concept of sand mining transitions are being applied and tested at case studies in Mexico and China. Ongoing global synthesis efforts will also produce the first assessment of species threatened by construction minerals mining globally and will contribute to better understand how conflicts between construction minerals mining and human communities emerge and develop.
A drastic problem calls for drastic solutions – truly doing things differently to put aside problems and create pathways to sustainability. The SANDLINKS project articulates a new perspective on the global sand sustainability debate. Over the last decades, scientists have developed approaches for thinking through how disparate phenomena are connected over space and time (so-called ‘telecouplings’); such as how a change in policy in one place can have unexpected impacts somewhere else. Simultaneously, industrial ecologists have developed methods to quantify and visualize the metabolism of society through inflows of materials and energy from the environment (so-called ‘physical economy’). The first part of the project developed the framework that connects these different branches of sustainability science and shines a new light on the world’s consumption of sand, looking at pathways for preventing and alleviating ‘sand crises’. Instead of looking at components such as geology, logistics, environment, or policy in isolation, this approach looks at the entire sand-supply network to gain a holistic understanding of the stresses on both nature and people across time and space. According to this framework, using sand resources in a way that delivers sustainable prosperity hinges on a good understanding of the physical dimension of sand-supply networks (their backbone), their environmental and socioeconomic impacts across scales and sites (their outcomes), and ultimately on how people decide how, how much, and which materials to use (their brain).
Following this perspective, the research in the project has introduced three major new ideas: 1) Sand-supply networks exhibit complex system properties that can be tracked through the evolution of physical material stocks and flows over time. Non-linear demand is strongly influenced by legacy effects such as the nature of existing production facilities and infrastructure stocks in the built environment or regulatory environments that entail lock-in effects into carbon-intensive pathways. Feedbacks between supply and demand are driven by resource constraints and consumer choices, spillovers and leakages, climate change, and risks of biological invasions. 2) Sand-supply networks change in the face of disruptions from small-scale artisanal mining relying mostly on common-pool resources towards larger-scale regional supply systems that include mega quarries for crushed rock, marine dredging, and the recycling of construction and demolition waste. 3) Transition pathways do not necessarily result in the greening of production because they depend on factors such as resource availability, capital, and technology to exploit resources or implement management and monitoring. For example, a transition from river mining to crushed rock production risks displacing impacts towards air pollution and water consumption. The main implication is that ignoring sand-supply networks’ complexity can result in unsustainable “solutions”, including problem shifts and unintended consequences of regulations.
The framework of sand-supply networks and the concept of sand mining transitions are being applied and tested at case studies in Mexico and China. Ongoing global synthesis efforts will also produce the first assessment of species threatened by construction minerals mining globally and will contribute to better understand how conflicts between construction minerals mining and human communities emerge and develop.