Resilience and Malleability of Social Metabolism

Crises such as wars, pandemics, and climate extremes destabilize global supply chains. But how do they affect resource use, sustainability, inequality, and social well-being? REMASS addresses these questions with the help of new approaches to researching society’s metabolism, i.e. resource flows and stocks (for example in buildings and infrastructures) and what they contribute to society. REMASS will generate a social metabolism database with unprecedented granularity, allowing researchers to quantify the resilience of the metabolism to supply chain disruptions using big data approaches in complexity research. REMASS will be analyzing the malleability of resource use in three important supply systems (food, housing, and mobility) and identifying key actors, decision-making processes, and power relations.

“The increasing use of natural resources is driving global warming, while at the same time current crises are threatening global supply chains. In our research, we analyze the resilience of resource use and options for making it more sustainable – perhaps we will even find tipping points towards more sustainability and justice,” says Helmut Haberl, coordinator, about the goals of the Emerging Field project.