Recent Development
- MFA concepts have been or are being incorporated in national accounts in several countries and regions such as the EU and Japan.
- Several international conferences or other meetings provide a platform for researchers and policymakers to meet and exchange results and ideas. A prominent example is the World Resources Forum, a bi-annual international conference on material flow analysis and sustainable development held in Davos, Switzerland. Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, Dennis Meadows, and Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker from the UNEP Resource Panel were among the keynote speakers during the 2009 event.
- MFA-IO is an approach to establish an MFA system of the whole economy using monetary and physical Input-Output tables.
- Dynamic MFA aims for long-term quantification of MFA systems and uses historic development patterns of physical stocks and flows to create robust scenarios for the years and decades to come.
- The current centre for MFA research is Japan. The country has scarce mineral resources and is therefore dependent on imports of energy carriers, ores, and other raw materials. The Japanese government fosters research on material cycles and also inaugurated the 3-R concept.
Read more about this topic: Material Flow Analysis
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