Monitoring domestic material consumption at subnational level: Enabling the territorial perspective

Abstract

The growing awareness that business as usual is both, unwise and unsustainable, has placed the role of the environment and the efficient use of natural resources at the centre of political and economic strategies. At the same time, mitigation strategies and monitoring frameworks geared to sustainability are generally implemented at national or supranational levels, failing short in providing significant guidance for local policy makers. This thesis provides a methodology for scaling national environmental indicators to lower levels considering territorial heterogeneity. Hence, it provides a regional database for resource consumption that represents a critical input to expand the understanding on the complex relationship between resource consumption, territorial contexts and socioeconomic drivers. The analysis highlights the existence of a significant technological gap between urban and rural regions, the latter struggling the most to recover from economic crises and to retain human capital. Going further, a closer inspection on the impacts of socioeconomic drivers on resource efficiency across different regional economic structures reveals that increased access to capital would generate higher resource efficiency returns in material-intensive economies, compared with service-based economies. Differently, increased agglomeration levels represent the best resource efficiency leverage across urban territories.Overall, the thesis brings into discussion a renewed interest for the consideration of territorial aspects for a better understanding of the dialectics between the underlying forces driving regional resource efficiency and the different opportunities and challenges that regions might face according to their specific endowments.