Implications of resource use for development and the environment. Vienna. 2012.

SERI report – Monika Dittrich, Stefan Giljum, Stephan Lutter, Christine Polzin : Green economies around the world ?

A global picture of past and current distribution, trends and basic patterns of resource use
between 1980 and 2008 around the world and illustrating their links to development and environmental issues in industrialized, emerging and developing countries.

Kandeh K. Yumkella
Director-General, United Nations Industrial Development Organization ( UNIDO )
“As material resources become scarcer, securing resource-efficient, low-carbon growth is more vital than ever to sustain the planet’s ecosystems and the services they provide.
Business as usual is not an option. At UNIDO, we are working to encourage the decoupling of economic growth from the use of natural resources and its negative environmental impacts”.

Jochen Flasbarth
President, German Federal Environment Agency
“More and more, global resource use exceeds the regeneration rates of our ecosystems. Therefore, the sustainable use of natural resources has been a key issue for the German Federal Environment Agency ( UBA ) for years. Important goals are to reduce global resource consumption in absolute terms and to minimize the interlinked ecological and social impacts of our resource consumption. That is to dematerialise our societies in industrialized countries
by a factor of 10 or more to meet the needs of all people in the future. To achieve these goals, we need a sound understanding of the different aspects of flows of materials like fossil fuels, biomass, metals and minerals, including all the relevant life cycle stages”.

Ernst U. von Weizsäcker
Co-chair of International Resource Panel United Nations Environment Program ( UNEP )
Essential information about links between resource use and development as well as between resource use and environmental problems. It illustrates the dramatic changes which took place over the past decades and emphasizes that reducing the overall scale of resource consumption is a major challenge.

Michael Warhurst
Resources and Consumption Campaign, Friends of the Earth Europe
“We believe that using these metrics – at the level of the economy, in policy analysis, in organizations or for products, will facilitate increased resource efficiency and increased resource equity, around the world. Already, there are studies looking at the way in which carbon footprint, water footprint and land footprint are traded around the world, which expose the massive inequalities in resource use”.