The Use of Natural Resources in the Economy: A Global Manual on Economy Wide Material Flow Accounting

MFA data sets and indicators are part of the work programme of a growing number of national statistical offices globally and the global application of EW-MFA accounts in national statistics, beyond Europe, has required the creation of a global guidance manual. This global EW-MFA manual builds on the experience and excellence of the Eurostat accounting guidelines but extends them in several important ways. The global EW-MFA manual: • presents a modular approach to EW-MFA accounting to allow national statistical offices with different levels of capability in accounting to establish the accounts • addresses specific issues of resource-extractive economies and subsistence economic activities which are more prevalent in developing countries • favours practicality before detail and focuses on such methods that allow statisticians to capture the important aspects of material throughput in their economy • also aims to establish a connection between the EW-MFA accounts established, and the environmental and economic policy questions that can be informed by using EW-MFA based data sets and indicators. The global EW-MFA manual is structured into eight chapters. • Chapter 1 focuses on general accounting principles, the relationship to other accounting systems; it describes common data sources for EW-MFA accounts and introduces the main structure of the manual. • Chapter 2 presents the core of any EW-MFA account, namely the domestic extraction of materials – biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores, and non-metallic minerals. • Chapter 3 describes the accounting principles and specific issues that occur when establishing material accounts for the trade of goods. • Chapter 4 focuses on material outflows (from the economy to the environment) such as e.g. waste disposal and emissions and builds a bridge to important environmental policy issues of pollution and toxicity. • Chapter 5 integrates the input and output sides of EW-MFA accounts in a material flow balance. • Chapter 6 presents headline indicators from EWMFA accounts which are most commonly used by the policy community. • Chapters 7 and 8 discuss additional aspects of EW-MFA: material footprint accounts and material stock accounts. The accounting methods for these are, however, not covered in any detail in this edition of the manual.