Preface

 

Japan and the other industrialized countries harvest massive quantities of natural resources from the environment, and process them into correspondingly massive quantities of different products. Consuming these products makes lives more convenient and richer. Meanwhile, the pollutants produced during the production and consumption phases, as well as the products after they are consumed, are returned to the environment as waste. The scale of this material cycle between humankind and the natural environment greatly exceeds the environment’s natural capacity to regenerate its resources and cleanse itself of waste. In short, the majority of today’s environmental issues are linked to the socio-economic pattern of mass production, mass consumption, and mass disposal.

The recognition that the environment has a finite amount of available resources, and a finite capacity to cleanse itself of waste, is fundamental for debating sustainable development. Chapter 4 of Agenda 21 points out that the current pattern of production and consumption of the industrialized nations is not sustainable, and “sustainable consumption” was a key concept at the Rio+10 summit held in Johannesburg.

Today’s economy is characterized by this massive consumption of materials. A systematic grasp of the flows of energy and materials between the environment and economic activities, and between the various economic entities, is essential for analyzing the relationship between such an economy and environmental issues. Material flow accounting/material flow analysis is a powerful method for achieving this goal. At the National Institute for Environmental Studies, a study on environmental and natural resource accounting has been carried out since 1991 by the Global Environment Research Fund. For Japan, which relies on massive imports of resources, it is particularly vital to make global issues be reflected in environmental resource accounting. This data book uses data on the trade of natural resources prepared during this process.

Meanwhile, the United States, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria, and other countries have also been developing material flow accounting studies, and there has been international cooperation on research in this area. The first results of joint research with these countries were published in 1997 as Resource Flows, and the second in 2000 as The Weight of Nations.

(http:// materials.wri.org/pubs_newsviews.cfm?PubID=2742,http://materials.wri.org/weightofnations-pub-3023.html)

The greatest feature of this international joint research is its focus on so-called “hidden flows” (originally dubbed “ecological rucksacks” by German researchers), or the fact that more materials are taken from the environment than are actually input into economic activities. These flows are called “hidden” because they are missed by conventional material-flow tracking. The massive size of Japan’s imports in absolute terms shows how large Japan’s role in these hidden flows is.

Based on this background, this data book aims to be used as a reference for thinking about resource-related environmental issues, recognizing Japan’s role in world resource trade. The data book presents data on the trade of major natural resources, extracted and tabulated from UN trade statistics, in map and matrix format. This second edition adds data from 1998, and is provided in both Japanese and English. It additionally includes a CD-ROM containing maps and matrices.

This data book is intended as a first step toward learning about global issues from the perspective of international trade. It can also serve as a reference for evaluating products and corporate activities from an environmental perspective from “cradle to grave” (i.e. over their entire life cycle), as well as a source of basic data for research on environmental economic models and other topics.

 

March 2003

   

 

Yuichi Moriguchi

                                                              Seiji Hashimoto

                            National Institute for Environmental Studies