Summary In order to fully comprehend the socioeconomic metabolic (SEM) dynamics and material balance of nations, long‐term accounting of economy‐wide material stock is necessary in parallel to material flow accounts. Nevertheless, material stock accounts have been scarce, isolated, and mostly focused either on single materials, short time spans, or small regions. This study has two objectives: (1) review the state of the art of material stock research in the SEM discourse and (2) present a project to map, in a high level of detail, the in‐use construction material stocks of Japan and its 47 prefectures from the 1940s until the present era. This project documents the two major depositories of material stock: buildings and infrastructure. We describe the challenges and benefits of utilizing a bottom‐up approach, in order to promote its usage in material stock studies. The resulting database presents the accumulation of stock over time, as well as visually displaying the spatial distribution of the stock using geographical information systems (GIS), which, we argue, is an essential aspect of material stock analysis in the context of socioeconomic metabolism research.

Given that national pledges are likely insufficient to meet Paris greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets (Fawcett et al 2015 Science 350), increasingly actors at the city and state level are looking for options on how local government can contribute to reducing GHG emissions. For a typical city only one third to half of their carbon footprint (CF) is emitted within the jurisdiction, while the majority is embodied in goods and services flowing into the city. To support well-informed mitigation efforts, administrators need robust inventories of both direct emissions as well as the supply chain emissions. Here we construct household CF inventories for 1172 Japanese cities using detailed consumer expenditure data and a Japanese domestic multi-regional input-output (MRIO) model. We identify the consumption activities which city policymakers can target to reduce CF. We observe a strong concentration of household CF in a few cities in Japan: 40% of the total Japanese CF is driven by 143 cities. Understanding a city’s consumption-based CF of households in addition to its direct emissions exposes additional policy options for each citizen to contribute to achieving national goals.

A large number of buildings have been built for the urbanization of China in recent decades. A huge amount of material input in construction leads to the problem of high consumption, high emission and the waste of buildings in the future. In the urbanization context, one way to solve the environmental problems is new-type urbanization, which means focusing on resource-conserving cities and environment-friendly cities. This paper presents an analytical method for urban building metabolism by using four-dimensional Geographical Information Systems (4d-GIS). In this research, we establish the database of buildings by calculating floor area, material intensity, material flow and demolition curve, based on the study area (Ezhou City in Hubei Province, China), and present the city by aerial view of 4d-GIS image. 4D-GIS could be applied in material analysis of urban material metabolism and spatial data analysis. Moreover, it can also quantify and visualize urban metabolism and provide references and solutions for urban planning, which is new-type urbanization.

Summary This study looks into material flow trends in the Philippines from 1985 to 2010 by utilizing the methodology of economy‐wide material flow analysis. Using domestic data sources, this study presents disaggregated annual material flow trends in terms of four major material categories, namely: biomass; fossil energy carriers; ores and industrial minerals; and construction minerals. The results describe in detail the growth of material flows in a high‐density country at the onset of its development and reveal the shift of material consumption from dominance of renewable materials in 1985 to nonrenewable materials in 2010. IPAT analysis shows that the increase in material consumption was driven by population growth from 1985 to 1998 and by growth in affluence from 1999 to 2010. However, high inequalities amidst the growing economy suggest that a small group of wealthy people have influenced the acceleration of material consumption in the Philippines. The results of this research are intended to provide a thorough analysis of the processes occurring in Philippine economic growth in order to assist in tackling implications for the important issue of sustainable resource management.

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