Risks of global supply chain disruptions resulting from geopolitical tensions, environmental changes, pandemics and wars are mounting, but scientific capabilities to grasp their implications for social wellbeing and sustainability are lacking. 

This FWF funded project aims to establish a new interdisciplinary field of socio-metabolic malleability and resilience science focused on systematically studying how the current material foundation of societies—their social metabolism (encompassing resource flows and material stocks essential for social well-being)—is impacted by supply disruptions and can be transformed toward sustainability.  Socio-metabolic research (SMR) has advanced understanding of resource use and sustainability, but gaps remain due to the application of static models and limited data. By integrating SMR with Complexity Science and Political Ecology, REMASS aims to increase understanding of how societies can maintain key functions and high levels of wellbeing for all, without incurring unbearable social, ecological and environmental stress or risking breakdowns.

Main Objectives of REMASS:

REMASS will achieve breakthroughs in the emerging field of socio-metabolic malleability and resilience science by undertaking novel analysis to:

Quantify and Further Understand Resilience and Malleability of Social Metabolism

  • Create a detailed global social metabolism database to trace resources from extraction to disposal and study their impacts for wellbeing, inequality and sustainability. 
  • Assess social metabolism's resilience to global disruptions, focusing on both the Global North and South.
  • Support sustainability research by providing data for biophysical assessments in circular economy and renewable energy contexts. 
  • Evaluate implications for current and future sustainability transformations.
  • Identify and understand non-linear trajectories in social metabolism; for example, tipping points.

Advance Non-linear, Complex Systems Modeling

  • Develop innovative models using big data, Complexity Science, and non-linear system methods.
  • Create global agent-based models using granular national supply chain and firm-level data to measure system resilience under specific disruption scenarios.
  • Analyze whether national production networks exhibit smooth or abrupt transitions and explore the predictability and control of such transitions for sustainable transformations.
  • Assess the potential for rapid sociometabolic transitions to drive necessary systemic changes on a global scale while avoiding unintended consequences detrimental to social wellbeing. 

Link Social Metabolism with Actors and Institutions

  • Establish qualitative and quantitative connections between social metabolism, decision-making, and institutions.
  • Examine past, ongoing, and future socio-ecological transitions to understand their impact on resource demand, wellbeing, and resilience of provisioning systems under disruptions.
  • Address social inequalities by analyzing how access to resources and infrastructure varies across locations and social groups under given provisioning systems, and how this impacts wellbeing.
  • Analyze how resource flows, regulations, and decisions by various actors' influence wellbeing, service needs, and provisioning systems for shelter, nutrition and mobility across regions and populations.

Project Partners:

 

Advisory Board:
Cooperation Partners:
 

 

 

 

Funding Acknowledgements:

This research is funded in whole or in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)10.55776/EFP5.

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