Information: A Crucial Resource for Resource Management

Material Flow Analysis (MFA) is a crucial decision support tool in resource and waste management. The freeware STAN (Cencic and Rechberger 2008) has proven to be a practicable and flexible tool for MFAs, that allows to consider uncertainties, and provides practicable functions not only for visualization, but also for modeling of material flows and stocks. Elaborate studies of anthropogenic cycles have often revealed information that would remain unknown without sophisticated system studies and extensive data search (Chen and Graedel 2012). In MFA, cross-disciplinary data from heterogeneous sources such as official trade statistics, scientific findings and consumer behavior studies, are combined. However, there is often no data or limited data available for MFA which is, among others, because relevant data may be confidential, lost, highly aggregated or real-world phenomena are simply too complex to be measured. On the other hand, today the possibilities to access and communicate information from various sources are immense, and 'it is sometimes said that we now have more and more information that we know less and less aboutâ€� (Madnick and Zhu 2006). This is often due to improperly understood or used data semantics and limited context knowledge (Madnick and Zhu 2006). Although there is an approach for the assessment of data uncertainties in MFA that was applied several times and further developed (Hedbrant and Sörme 2001), there remains a fundamental question: What data in MFA actually is, how it can be perceived, understood and assessed. In other disciplines, mainly social sciences, such 'theories of dataâ€� have been subject to research since many years (Bichlbauer 1989), but are still lacking in MFA.

 

 

Dipl. Geoökol. Oliver Schwab

Dipl.-Ing. David Laner

Professor Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Helmut Rechberger

 

 

Hochlauf der Wasserstoffwirtschaft
© Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (8/2024)
Überblick über und Diskussion der Maßnahmen zum beschleunigten Ausbau der Wasserstoffinfrastruktur in Deutschland

Die innerstaatliche Umsetzung des Pariser Klimaschutzübereinkommens - ein Rechtsvergleich
© Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (8/2024)
Like all public international law treaties, the Paris Climate Accords rely on national law for their implementation. The success of the agreement therefore depends, to a large extent, on the stepstaken or not taken by national governments and legislators as well as on the instruments and mechanisms chosen for this task. Against this background, the present article compares different approaches to the implementation of the Paris Agreement, using court decisions as a means to assess their (legal) effectiveness.

Klimaschutzrecht und Erzeugung erneuerbarer Energien in der Schweiz
© Lexxion Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (8/2024)
Verschachtelte Gesetzgebung unter politischer Ungewissheit

 

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