Material Flows Accounting: A Biophysical Approach to Macroeconomic Sustainability

The increasing dimension of socio-environmental problems make sustainability a macroeconomic issue and new methodological instruments are needed. In this paper, Material Flows Accounting is presented as a new statistical approach for an evaluation of macroeconomic sustainability. Based on the pre-analytic vision that economies are an open system embedded in the environment, it provides an overview in tonnes of annual material inputs and outputs of an economy. It quantifies the physical dimension of societies and analyses the “size” of the human economy in the geo-biosphere. As it provides information about efficiency and material requirements, it is a very important method for analysing whether a nation is moving towards sustainability or away from it. Used in many official statistics, it will become one of the most powerful tools in describing sustainability at the macroeconomic level. In this paper, after the presentation of the Material Flows Accounting approach, an Italian case study is considered.