A Comprehensive Material Flow Account for Lao PDR to Inform Environmental and Sustainability Policy

Abstract

Summary Modern environmental and sustainability policy that acknowledges the linkages between socioeconomic processes and environmental pressures and impacts, and designs policies to decouple economic activity from environmental pressures and impacts, requires a sophisticated and comprehensive knowledge base. The concept of industrial metabolism provides a sound conceptual base, and material flow accounting—including primary material inputs and outflows of waste and emissions—provides a well‐accepted operationalization. Studies presenting a comprehensive material flow account for a national economy are rare, especially for developing countries. Countries such as Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR or Laos) face dual objectives of improving the material standard of living of their people while managing natural resources sustainably and mitigating adverse environmental impacts from growing resource throughput. Our research fills a knowledge gap, presents a comprehensive account of material inputs and outflows of waste and emissions for the Lao PDR national economy, and applies the accounting approach for a low‐income economy in Asia. We present a material balance for the years 2000 and 2015. For this research, we used data from Lao PDR national statistics and the accounting guidelines of the European Statistical Office (Eurostat), which pioneered the use of material flow data as part of its official statistical reporting. We demonstrate the feasibility of the accounting approach and discuss the robustness of results using uncertainty analysis conducted with statistical approaches commonly used in the field of industrial ecology, including Gauss's law of error propagation and Monte Carlo simulation. We find that the fast‐changing scale and composition of Lao PDR material flows, waste, and emissions presents challenges to the existing policy capacity and will require investment into governance of changed patterns of material use, waste disposal, and emissions. We consider the data analysis sufficiently robust to inform such a change in policy direction.

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part I: bibliometric and conceptual mapping

“…the relevance of productionbased and consumption-based approaches (Krausmann et al 2017, Zhang et al 2018, Haberl et al 2019. Datasets are increasingly becoming available that go beyond aggregate indicators and trace materials and energy carriers from extraction to final uses, their accumulation in stocks of manufactured capital and the resulting wastes and emissions, strictly following thermodynamic principles and mass-balances (Kovanda 2017, Krausmann et al 2018, Martinico-Perez et al 2018, Schandl and Miatto 2018, Vilaysouk et al 2019. These efforts, especially when taking into account the available complexity of energy indicators along the entire conversion chains, could provide innovative systems-based insights into resource decoupling.…”

Semisupervised machine learning classification framework for material intensity parameters of residential buildings

“…They allow probabilistic dynamic stock–flow model implementations at various scales. Knowing the type of distribution can be expected to facilitate quantification of the uncertainty of results (Cao et al., 2018; Laner et al., 2016; Rechberger et al., 2014; Vilaysouk et al., 2017; Vilaysouk et al., 2019). For instance, to conduct a Monte Carlo simulation for analyzing the uncertainty of the material stock model results, one would need to know the type of the distribution and its parameters.…”

Proposal for a new compilation system for metal ores in economy wide material flow accounting

“…Total copper production from both mines in 2014 was broadly similar (98 kt from Sepon, 90 kt from Phu Kham). Had the historical grade from Sepon been used to back-calculate ore production, it would have underestimated DE of ores by around 16 million tonnes, or more than 60% (and equal to over 12% of all Lao PDR's DE for all material categories for that year, as reported in Vilaysouk, Schandl, and Murakami (2019)). Conversely, applying the default grade of 1.04% Cu from Eurostat (2018) to the Lao PDRs production for 2007 (62.5 kt, from USGS (2019a)), when copper production came from Sepon only, would have overestimated ROM copper production for that year by around 5 million tonnes, or over 140% of all DE of metal ores for that year reported in Vilaysouk et al (2019).…”

“…Had the historical grade from Sepon been used to back-calculate ore production, it would have underestimated DE of ores by around 16 million tonnes, or more than 60% (and equal to over 12% of all Lao PDR's DE for all material categories for that year, as reported in Vilaysouk, Schandl, and Murakami (2019)). Conversely, applying the default grade of 1.04% Cu from Eurostat (2018) to the Lao PDRs production for 2007 (62.5 kt, from USGS (2019a)), when copper production came from Sepon only, would have overestimated ROM copper production for that year by around 5 million tonnes, or over 140% of all DE of metal ores for that year reported in Vilaysouk et al (2019). Validation of the assertion that changing ore sources has actually had a huge effect on the average national grades for the Laos PDR (and so the magnitude of errors which can accompany back-calculation) is provided by the time series for copper grades provided in , where the national average grade is seen to drop precipitously from >2.25% Cu in 2007 to <0.5% by 2013.…”