Spatially explicit material footprints: fine-scale assessment of Europe’s global environmental and social impacts

Project Information

FINEPRINT

Grant agreement ID: 725525

DOI

10.3030/725525

Project closed

EC signature date 16 June 2017

Start date 1 July 2017

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 999 908,75

EU contribution

€ 1 999 908,75

Coordinated by

WIRTSCHAFTSUNIVERSITAT WIEN
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - FINEPRINT (Spatially explicit material footprints: fine-scale assessment of Europe’s global environmental and social impacts)

Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2022-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the era of globalisation, supply chains are increasingly organised on the international level, thus disconnecting the location of production from final consumption. Today, the world economy uses more than 95 billion tonnes of renewable and non-renewable raw materials and levels are constantly increasing. This strongly increases environmental pressures and impacts related to raw material extraction, for example in mining or agriculture.

Methods to assess the worldwide interlinkages between raw material extraction, trade, manufacturing, and consumption have improved significantly over the past few years. The approach most widely applied for consumption-based (i.e. footprint-type) assessments at the country level is multi-regional input-output (MRIO) analysis. Global monetary MRIO databases have been developed and continuously advanced. However, major limitations remain, such as the limited number of industries and products covered in monetary MRIO databases and the missing spatial detail of the models on the sub-national level. FINEPRINT aimed at overcoming some of these shortcomings.

The overall objective of FINEPRINT was to develop and apply new methods for fine-scale assessments of the environmental impacts of resource extraction and for tracking material flows along global supply chains.

To achieve this, FINEPRINT
(1) investigated the spatial distribution of raw material extraction on a high level of geographical detail for a wide range of raw materials;
(2) analysed the relation between raw material extraction and related environmental impacts, including issues such as deforestation and water scarcity;
(3) created physical MRIO models on the national level for a range of raw materials and related products, which are downscaled to the sub-national level; and
(4) performed fine-scale assessments of the global material footprint of countries and the related environmental impacts.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Global resource extraction and related environmental impacts
• Mine-level production database: We developed the first open database on mining production based on mining company reports. The data set compiled from more than 2,100 different sources covers 83 different raw materials extracted in more than 80 countries.
• Land use of mining: We used satellite data to compile the most comprehensive data set on global mining land use currently available, comprising 45,000 polygons of mining areas. The data set is visualised in the FINEPRINT Viewer (www.fineprint.global/viewer).
• Mining and deforestation: We performed the first global assessments of deforestation caused by the expansion of mining sites. In addition to scientific publications, results from our research were the foundation for the WWF report ‘Extracted Forests’.
• Agriculture and deforestation: In addition to mining, we also investigated, whether and how spatial spillovers can be observed between the expansion of agricultural areas (crop production, livestock farming) and deforestation.

Global supply chain models and footprint assessments
• Global model for agricultural and food products: In FINEPRINT, we developed FABIO, the Food and Agriculture Biomass Input-Output Model based on UN FAO data in physical units (www.fineprint.global/fabio). FABIO covers 191 countries, 121 processes and 130 commodities. The FABIO model was applied to a large variety of topics, such global footprints of food consumption or the climate benefits of dietary changes.
• Spatially explicit biomass footprints: We developed a transparent and reproducible approach to trace consumption-driven biomass flows and embodied land-use footprints at a high level of spatial detail and applied the approach to the Brazilian soybean complex.
• Physical global models for metal products: We developed physical models of metal ores, applying the “PIOLab” approach (in cooperation with colleagues from the University of Sydney). As a first pilot case, we applied this approach to the case of global iron and steel flows.
• Supply chain models for metal products with spatially explicit environmental data. We used global supply chain models in combination with spatially explicit data on the impacts of mining to investigate e.g. deforestation embodied in global trade of metal products.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The FINEPRINT project made significant progress beyond the state of the art in several thematic areas. Results delivered include new methodologies, new global datasets and models, a wide range of empirical assessments as well as innovative online tools to communicate results. Following the principle of open science, we made available all codes underlying our research in a GitHub repository (https://github.com/fineprint-global). Further, all data sets were published openly in repositories such as Zenodo or PANGAEA.

Global resource extraction and related environmental impacts
• Our work on assessing the land area occupied by mining activities on the global level through investigating satellite images was groundbreaking. Earlier studies had focused on a small number of global mining sites or on a selected mining region only and data for assessments on the global level was generally missing.
• We compiled and presented the most comprehensive open database on mine-specific production (www.fineprint.global/mining-database). This allows overcoming restrictions imposed by other commercial data products.
• We developed an interactive global map (www.fineprint.global/viewer) where users can analyse the mining land use data as well as the locations of the mine-specific production data. Further, the production levels and commodity composition of each mine is presented in a separate visualisation section (www.fineprint.global/global-coal-and-metal-mining-viewer).

Global supply chain models and footprint assessments
• In the area of food and agricultural products, the global model of biomass flows (FABIO) is the most comprehensive physical MRIO model openly available to the research community. Its very high product and country detail opened up new dimensions for assessing the often distant environmental impacts related to the consumption of agricultural and food products. FINEPRINT also further developed the FABIO viewer, where user can investigate global supply chains of agricultural and food products (www.fineprint.global/fabio-viewer).
• We developed an approach for performing spatially explicit supply chain assessments for agricultural products based solely on publicly accessible data and tested the approach for the case study on soya from Brazil.
• FINEPRINT also presented the first global physical MRIO model for metal ores using iron and steel products as a case study. Spatially explicit accounts of mining were integrated into global MRIO models to trace related environmental impacts from producer to consumer countries.

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