Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SANDLINKS (Framing sand sustainability in a telecoupled world)
Reporting period: 2019-10-01 to 2021-09-30
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.