Understanding how the economic activity of a nation will evolve and react to perturbations is an ... more Understanding how the economic activity of a nation will evolve and react to perturbations is an important requirement for both fiscal and physical planning. Current modeling solutions lack the capability to assess either, or both of, national investment capacity in technical infrastructure, or the systemic economic implications of such investments. The 4see whole-economy framework developed at Arup is a new approach to this problem. The framework harmonises multiple national accounting procedures within the constraints of the internationally accepted System of National Accounts (2008). This structure curates and maintains disparate accounts (economic stocks and flows, energy use, employment, transport etc.) in parallel, but retains their own unique currency and accounting requirements. The data organisation and correction procedures behind the UK model are relatively generic and will allow model development for other countries with relatively less effort. The framework includes cap...
In a resource-constrained world with growing population and demand for energy, goods, and service... more In a resource-constrained world with growing population and demand for energy, goods, and services with commensurate environmental impacts, we need to understand how these trends relate to various aspects of economic activity. 7see-GB is a computational model that links energy demand through to final economic consumption, and is used to explore decadal scenarios for the UK macroeconomy. This dataset includes the published model (*.vpm) from the source model 7see-GB, version 5-30 (14Nov17). They show how results were created for the paper "Consequences of selecting technology pathways on cumulative CO2 emissions for the UK". The source model was developed in Vensim® (5.8b) and these published models can be viewed with the Vensim Reader, as provided with this dataset. There are instructions on how to navigate the published models and inspect variables shown in the paper. The .exe and .dmg files are free "Model Reader" executables for Windows/OSX which allow a user to run the model without buying the Vensim simulator.
In an integrated analysis of an Australia with 20, 25 or 32 million people by the year 2050, six ... more In an integrated analysis of an Australia with 20, 25 or 32 million people by the year 2050, six dilemmas emerged which link human population, labour, physical trade, material flows, greenhouse emissions and natural resource depletion. Each dilemma and the interactions between dilemmas are guided by many assumptions within the base case scenario, and the laws which constrain the physical world. Single dilemmas are mostly open to resolution within the current settings of technology and ideology. However the co-resolution of two, three or more dilemmas in parallel is difficult because of human behavioural dynamics that lie outside the context of the analytical methods. Dilemma one is that population is ageing and birth rates seem destined to decline. High immigration can help reduce ageing in a proportional sense, but absolute numbers of aged citizens continue to rise and the supporting and caring tasks do not decline. Dilemma two is that reasonably full employment is feasible under a...
In accounting for carbon emissions, the conventional wisdom is that the service industry is 'emis... more In accounting for carbon emissions, the conventional wisdom is that the service industry is 'emissions light', but this is not supported when goods and other inputs to services production are included. We examine greenhouse gas emissions in detail for Australia, Germany, Italy, the UK and USA and find similarities for the service industry. Taking the UK as a case study, we apply the 7see system dynamics modelling approach that accounts for both physical capacity limits and empirical data from economic activity. Service emissions are more than doubled when imported inputs are included in a consumption basis, and that UK emissions would reduce only to 42 million tonnes annually by 2050. Tackling service emissions requires additional efficiency measures for energy-use and goods-use and considering the emission intensities of exporting countries for imports. The four key goods underpinning the UK service industry that are continuing to grow are electronic, pharmaceutical, materials and machinery. Energy policy can only deliver net-zero emissions by treating the service industry as a single unified entity, especially important because it provides the majority of employment.
The UK Government is legally committed to achieving an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions ... more The UK Government is legally committed to achieving an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions compared with 1990 by 2050. The use of scenarios is wide ranging to inform policy development and forming a businessas-usual scenario helps to understand possible effects of different policy interventions. However, the term business-as-usual is frequently misused. We show how econo-physical business-as-usual scenarios can be developed by examining the historical behaviour of coefficients which manifest the relationship between components of an economy. We endogenise economic growth by mimicking national level policies that focus on a target level of unemployment. Our case-study demonstrates the 'trendability' of coefficients which for one example coefficient is replicated for Australia, Colombia, Taiwan and the USA. We manifest a gross domestic product growth of 2% falling to 1% which contrasts with an exogenous growth of 2.3% of a comparator business-as-usual scenario. We suggest that it may be possible to achieve a greater reduction in the business-asusual carbon dioxide emissions in the UK fifth carbon budget than currently projected.
Investigating the energy use of an economy in a resource-constrained world requires an understand... more Investigating the energy use of an economy in a resource-constrained world requires an understanding of the relationships of its economic, social, and energy-use elements. We introduce a novel whole-economy analytical framework which harmonises multiple national accounting procedures. The economic elements align with the international system of national accounts. In a modular fashion, our framework curates and maintains disparate accounts (economic stocks and flows, energy use, employment, transport) in parallel, but retains each of their unique measurement unit and accounting requirements. We present the UK as a case study to demonstrate how the data organisation and conditioning procedures are generic and will allow model development for other countries. The framework is capable of exploiting time-series ratios between different measurement units to give key functional relationships that vary gradually over time, are robust and thus useful for analysing national policy complexities such as decarbonisation, employment, investment and balance of payments. We use novel Sankey diagrams to visualise snapshots of the whole system. The framework is neither an exclusively economic, physical, nor social model. It upholds the integrity of each world-view through retaining their unique time-series datasets. As this framework is agnostic to the way in which a nation organises its economy, it has the potential to reduce tension between competing models and philosophies of economic development, environmental refurbishment, and climate change mitigation.
... in emissions trading, or the Clean Development Mechanism and Activities Implemented Jointly i... more ... in emissions trading, or the Clean Development Mechanism and Activities Implemented Jointly initiatives ... 96 Urban Energy Transition 0.1 1 10 100 Expenditure ('000$ PPP/cap) AUS 98 ... This is because there exists today no renewable energy technol-ogy that, once economical ...
This work is copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), no part of this p... more This work is copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process, electronic or otherwise, without the specific written permission of the copyright owners. Neither may information be stored electronically in any form whatsoever without such permission. DISCLAIMER The authors do not warrant that the information in this book is free from errors or omissions. The authors do not accept any form of liability, be it contractual, tortious or otherwise, for the contents of this book or for any consequences arising from its use or any reliance placed upon it. The information, opinions and advice contained in this book may not relate to, or be relevant to, a reader's particular circumstances. Opinions expressed by the authors are the individual opinions of those persons and are not necessarily those of the publisher or research provider.
Triple Bottom Line accounting is widely advanced as a way in which firms can realise broader soci... more Triple Bottom Line accounting is widely advanced as a way in which firms can realise broader societal objectives in addition to increasing shareholder value. In our analysis of the Australian economy, we integrate financial input-output tables that describe the inter-dependencies between economic sectors, with national social and environmental accounts to construct numerate 'triple bottom line' accounts for 135 discrete sectors. The accounts are portrayed against the numeraire of 'one dollar of final demand'. Thus for a sector of the economy, financial aspects of performance can be expressed for example as dollars of export earnings per dollar of final demand. Social aspects such as employment can be portrayed as minutes of employment generated per dollar. Greenhouse issues can be portrayed as kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per dollar. Since these indicators of 'triple bottom line' performance are referenced against financial units and are consistent wit...
Participants in the Australian Rangeland Society’s Ninth Biennial Conference analysed four scenar... more Participants in the Australian Rangeland Society’s Ninth Biennial Conference analysed four scenarios for the future use and management of Australia’s rangelands. Analysis involved identifying the opportunities and threats posed by each scenario, the actions required to address them and the likelihood that the scenario might eventuate. We have reviewed these analyses and conclude that they reflect two possible directions which may determine the future of the rangelands. One possible direction entitled Looking Out, anticipates that the economic rewards generated by a full application of free market policies with rangeland enterprises having strong external linkages will result in production and management efficiencies which benefit the Australian economy. Under this direction, good financial returns from industries in the rangelands allow appropriate investment in human, cultural and ecological resources currently considered as being under threat; this in turn will lead to major readj...
The Australian Stocks and Flows Framework (ASFF) was developed to assess the biophysical longevit... more The Australian Stocks and Flows Framework (ASFF) was developed to assess the biophysical longevity of the Australian economy, with top-down coverage of the whole physical economy based on bottom-up process-based detail. The ASFF employs mass-balance identities associated with stock and flow dynamics throughout the national economy and associated interaction with the environment. We show that the ASFF shares common features with complementary approaches, including Mass Flow Analysis, Physical Input-Output Tables, and Life Cycle Analysis, but is distinctly different from these because the biophysical processes throughout the economy and environment are represented explicitly. The detailed physical processes modelled have a strong empirical basis, being calibrated with six or more decades of historical data. Given the coverage of the entire economy in physical terms, it provides for many subject specific analyses such as water, energy, climate change, etc, which can also be assessed in...
Though the local population was small in the 19th century, much biodiversity in Australia and oth... more Though the local population was small in the 19th century, much biodiversity in Australia and other sparsely populated regions was lost. This was because burgeoning numbers in Europe demanded products from large tracts of land overseas. The sources of demand have altered, but the same problems apply today.
Barney Foran and David Crane 1 CSIRO Resource Futures Program, PO Box 284, Canberra, ACT 2601, Au... more Barney Foran and David Crane 1 CSIRO Resource Futures Program, PO Box 284, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia Phone: ++61-2-62421710 Email: [email protected] 2 Centre for Human Ecology, UK [email protected] Abstract Solutions are tested in a physical sense, for a set of future and interconnected future challenges that centre on the losses of landscape function in Australia's farming zones, the possible depletion one human generation away of domestic oil stocks, and greenhouse gas emissions from the fossil energy sector. A partial solution to these intertwined problems could be the establishment of biomass plantations over the next 50 years that cover between 17 and 31 million hectares of Australia's croplands and high rainfall pasture zones. These biomass feedstocks produce either ethanol or methanol to gradually replace liquid transportation fuels currently produced from crude oil and its derivatives. The deep rooted perennial production systems help control hydrologica...
There is a wealth of studies on the trends of environmental pressures that demonstrate that the m... more There is a wealth of studies on the trends of environmental pressures that demonstrate that the main driver for the level and increase of resource uses and pollutant emissions is private consumption, and predominantly that in industrialized countries (Parikh and Painuly 1994). As a consequence, demand-side measures for achieving sustainability appear as promising complements to existing abatement strategies. The latter have been focusing on technological improvements, but have so far not lead to significant alleviations of many environmental problems. This is largely because population and affluence have outgrown technological progress (Mélanie et al. 1994, Hamilton and Turton 1999). When considering the design of demand-side measures, it is important to view them in a holistic, that is economy-wide and life-cycle context. Probably the first emergence of a substantial body of literature on resource policy studies grounded in life-cycle thinking was triggered by the oil crises of the...
Australia’s rangelands contain wildlands, relatively intact biodiversity, widespread Indigenous c... more Australia’s rangelands contain wildlands, relatively intact biodiversity, widespread Indigenous cultures, pastoral and mining industries all set in past and present events and mythologies. The nature of risks and threats to these rangelands is increasingly global and systemic. Future policy frameworks must acknowledge this and act accordingly. We collate current key information on land tenures and land uses, people and domestic livestock in Australian rangelands, and discuss five perspectives on how the rangelands are changing that should inform the development of integrated policy: climate and environmental change, the southern rangelands, the northern rangelands, Indigenous Australia, and governance and management. From these perspectives we argue that more attention must be paid to: ensuring a social licence to operate across a range of uses, acknowledging and supporting a younger, more Indigenous population, implementing positive aspects of technological innovation, halting capi...
Understanding how the economic activity of a nation will evolve and react to perturbations is an ... more Understanding how the economic activity of a nation will evolve and react to perturbations is an important requirement for both fiscal and physical planning. Current modeling solutions lack the capability to assess either, or both of, national investment capacity in technical infrastructure, or the systemic economic implications of such investments. The 4see whole-economy framework developed at Arup is a new approach to this problem. The framework harmonises multiple national accounting procedures within the constraints of the internationally accepted System of National Accounts (2008). This structure curates and maintains disparate accounts (economic stocks and flows, energy use, employment, transport etc.) in parallel, but retains their own unique currency and accounting requirements. The data organisation and correction procedures behind the UK model are relatively generic and will allow model development for other countries with relatively less effort. The framework includes cap...
In a resource-constrained world with growing population and demand for energy, goods, and service... more In a resource-constrained world with growing population and demand for energy, goods, and services with commensurate environmental impacts, we need to understand how these trends relate to various aspects of economic activity. 7see-GB is a computational model that links energy demand through to final economic consumption, and is used to explore decadal scenarios for the UK macroeconomy. This dataset includes the published model (*.vpm) from the source model 7see-GB, version 5-30 (14Nov17). They show how results were created for the paper "Consequences of selecting technology pathways on cumulative CO2 emissions for the UK". The source model was developed in Vensim® (5.8b) and these published models can be viewed with the Vensim Reader, as provided with this dataset. There are instructions on how to navigate the published models and inspect variables shown in the paper. The .exe and .dmg files are free "Model Reader" executables for Windows/OSX which allow a user to run the model without buying the Vensim simulator.
In an integrated analysis of an Australia with 20, 25 or 32 million people by the year 2050, six ... more In an integrated analysis of an Australia with 20, 25 or 32 million people by the year 2050, six dilemmas emerged which link human population, labour, physical trade, material flows, greenhouse emissions and natural resource depletion. Each dilemma and the interactions between dilemmas are guided by many assumptions within the base case scenario, and the laws which constrain the physical world. Single dilemmas are mostly open to resolution within the current settings of technology and ideology. However the co-resolution of two, three or more dilemmas in parallel is difficult because of human behavioural dynamics that lie outside the context of the analytical methods. Dilemma one is that population is ageing and birth rates seem destined to decline. High immigration can help reduce ageing in a proportional sense, but absolute numbers of aged citizens continue to rise and the supporting and caring tasks do not decline. Dilemma two is that reasonably full employment is feasible under a...
In accounting for carbon emissions, the conventional wisdom is that the service industry is 'emis... more In accounting for carbon emissions, the conventional wisdom is that the service industry is 'emissions light', but this is not supported when goods and other inputs to services production are included. We examine greenhouse gas emissions in detail for Australia, Germany, Italy, the UK and USA and find similarities for the service industry. Taking the UK as a case study, we apply the 7see system dynamics modelling approach that accounts for both physical capacity limits and empirical data from economic activity. Service emissions are more than doubled when imported inputs are included in a consumption basis, and that UK emissions would reduce only to 42 million tonnes annually by 2050. Tackling service emissions requires additional efficiency measures for energy-use and goods-use and considering the emission intensities of exporting countries for imports. The four key goods underpinning the UK service industry that are continuing to grow are electronic, pharmaceutical, materials and machinery. Energy policy can only deliver net-zero emissions by treating the service industry as a single unified entity, especially important because it provides the majority of employment.
The UK Government is legally committed to achieving an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions ... more The UK Government is legally committed to achieving an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions compared with 1990 by 2050. The use of scenarios is wide ranging to inform policy development and forming a businessas-usual scenario helps to understand possible effects of different policy interventions. However, the term business-as-usual is frequently misused. We show how econo-physical business-as-usual scenarios can be developed by examining the historical behaviour of coefficients which manifest the relationship between components of an economy. We endogenise economic growth by mimicking national level policies that focus on a target level of unemployment. Our case-study demonstrates the 'trendability' of coefficients which for one example coefficient is replicated for Australia, Colombia, Taiwan and the USA. We manifest a gross domestic product growth of 2% falling to 1% which contrasts with an exogenous growth of 2.3% of a comparator business-as-usual scenario. We suggest that it may be possible to achieve a greater reduction in the business-asusual carbon dioxide emissions in the UK fifth carbon budget than currently projected.
Investigating the energy use of an economy in a resource-constrained world requires an understand... more Investigating the energy use of an economy in a resource-constrained world requires an understanding of the relationships of its economic, social, and energy-use elements. We introduce a novel whole-economy analytical framework which harmonises multiple national accounting procedures. The economic elements align with the international system of national accounts. In a modular fashion, our framework curates and maintains disparate accounts (economic stocks and flows, energy use, employment, transport) in parallel, but retains each of their unique measurement unit and accounting requirements. We present the UK as a case study to demonstrate how the data organisation and conditioning procedures are generic and will allow model development for other countries. The framework is capable of exploiting time-series ratios between different measurement units to give key functional relationships that vary gradually over time, are robust and thus useful for analysing national policy complexities such as decarbonisation, employment, investment and balance of payments. We use novel Sankey diagrams to visualise snapshots of the whole system. The framework is neither an exclusively economic, physical, nor social model. It upholds the integrity of each world-view through retaining their unique time-series datasets. As this framework is agnostic to the way in which a nation organises its economy, it has the potential to reduce tension between competing models and philosophies of economic development, environmental refurbishment, and climate change mitigation.
... in emissions trading, or the Clean Development Mechanism and Activities Implemented Jointly i... more ... in emissions trading, or the Clean Development Mechanism and Activities Implemented Jointly initiatives ... 96 Urban Energy Transition 0.1 1 10 100 Expenditure ('000$ PPP/cap) AUS 98 ... This is because there exists today no renewable energy technol-ogy that, once economical ...
This work is copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), no part of this p... more This work is copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth), no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process, electronic or otherwise, without the specific written permission of the copyright owners. Neither may information be stored electronically in any form whatsoever without such permission. DISCLAIMER The authors do not warrant that the information in this book is free from errors or omissions. The authors do not accept any form of liability, be it contractual, tortious or otherwise, for the contents of this book or for any consequences arising from its use or any reliance placed upon it. The information, opinions and advice contained in this book may not relate to, or be relevant to, a reader's particular circumstances. Opinions expressed by the authors are the individual opinions of those persons and are not necessarily those of the publisher or research provider.
Triple Bottom Line accounting is widely advanced as a way in which firms can realise broader soci... more Triple Bottom Line accounting is widely advanced as a way in which firms can realise broader societal objectives in addition to increasing shareholder value. In our analysis of the Australian economy, we integrate financial input-output tables that describe the inter-dependencies between economic sectors, with national social and environmental accounts to construct numerate 'triple bottom line' accounts for 135 discrete sectors. The accounts are portrayed against the numeraire of 'one dollar of final demand'. Thus for a sector of the economy, financial aspects of performance can be expressed for example as dollars of export earnings per dollar of final demand. Social aspects such as employment can be portrayed as minutes of employment generated per dollar. Greenhouse issues can be portrayed as kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per dollar. Since these indicators of 'triple bottom line' performance are referenced against financial units and are consistent wit...
Participants in the Australian Rangeland Society’s Ninth Biennial Conference analysed four scenar... more Participants in the Australian Rangeland Society’s Ninth Biennial Conference analysed four scenarios for the future use and management of Australia’s rangelands. Analysis involved identifying the opportunities and threats posed by each scenario, the actions required to address them and the likelihood that the scenario might eventuate. We have reviewed these analyses and conclude that they reflect two possible directions which may determine the future of the rangelands. One possible direction entitled Looking Out, anticipates that the economic rewards generated by a full application of free market policies with rangeland enterprises having strong external linkages will result in production and management efficiencies which benefit the Australian economy. Under this direction, good financial returns from industries in the rangelands allow appropriate investment in human, cultural and ecological resources currently considered as being under threat; this in turn will lead to major readj...
The Australian Stocks and Flows Framework (ASFF) was developed to assess the biophysical longevit... more The Australian Stocks and Flows Framework (ASFF) was developed to assess the biophysical longevity of the Australian economy, with top-down coverage of the whole physical economy based on bottom-up process-based detail. The ASFF employs mass-balance identities associated with stock and flow dynamics throughout the national economy and associated interaction with the environment. We show that the ASFF shares common features with complementary approaches, including Mass Flow Analysis, Physical Input-Output Tables, and Life Cycle Analysis, but is distinctly different from these because the biophysical processes throughout the economy and environment are represented explicitly. The detailed physical processes modelled have a strong empirical basis, being calibrated with six or more decades of historical data. Given the coverage of the entire economy in physical terms, it provides for many subject specific analyses such as water, energy, climate change, etc, which can also be assessed in...
Though the local population was small in the 19th century, much biodiversity in Australia and oth... more Though the local population was small in the 19th century, much biodiversity in Australia and other sparsely populated regions was lost. This was because burgeoning numbers in Europe demanded products from large tracts of land overseas. The sources of demand have altered, but the same problems apply today.
Barney Foran and David Crane 1 CSIRO Resource Futures Program, PO Box 284, Canberra, ACT 2601, Au... more Barney Foran and David Crane 1 CSIRO Resource Futures Program, PO Box 284, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia Phone: ++61-2-62421710 Email: [email protected] 2 Centre for Human Ecology, UK [email protected] Abstract Solutions are tested in a physical sense, for a set of future and interconnected future challenges that centre on the losses of landscape function in Australia's farming zones, the possible depletion one human generation away of domestic oil stocks, and greenhouse gas emissions from the fossil energy sector. A partial solution to these intertwined problems could be the establishment of biomass plantations over the next 50 years that cover between 17 and 31 million hectares of Australia's croplands and high rainfall pasture zones. These biomass feedstocks produce either ethanol or methanol to gradually replace liquid transportation fuels currently produced from crude oil and its derivatives. The deep rooted perennial production systems help control hydrologica...
There is a wealth of studies on the trends of environmental pressures that demonstrate that the m... more There is a wealth of studies on the trends of environmental pressures that demonstrate that the main driver for the level and increase of resource uses and pollutant emissions is private consumption, and predominantly that in industrialized countries (Parikh and Painuly 1994). As a consequence, demand-side measures for achieving sustainability appear as promising complements to existing abatement strategies. The latter have been focusing on technological improvements, but have so far not lead to significant alleviations of many environmental problems. This is largely because population and affluence have outgrown technological progress (Mélanie et al. 1994, Hamilton and Turton 1999). When considering the design of demand-side measures, it is important to view them in a holistic, that is economy-wide and life-cycle context. Probably the first emergence of a substantial body of literature on resource policy studies grounded in life-cycle thinking was triggered by the oil crises of the...
Australia’s rangelands contain wildlands, relatively intact biodiversity, widespread Indigenous c... more Australia’s rangelands contain wildlands, relatively intact biodiversity, widespread Indigenous cultures, pastoral and mining industries all set in past and present events and mythologies. The nature of risks and threats to these rangelands is increasingly global and systemic. Future policy frameworks must acknowledge this and act accordingly. We collate current key information on land tenures and land uses, people and domestic livestock in Australian rangelands, and discuss five perspectives on how the rangelands are changing that should inform the development of integrated policy: climate and environmental change, the southern rangelands, the northern rangelands, Indigenous Australia, and governance and management. From these perspectives we argue that more attention must be paid to: ensuring a social licence to operate across a range of uses, acknowledging and supporting a younger, more Indigenous population, implementing positive aspects of technological innovation, halting capi...
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