type="main" xml:lang="en" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>In this article we compare the resource flows of Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru between 1980 and 2000. Our objective is to analyze the structure of social metabolism of extractive countries and the consequences of the neoliberal economic structural reforms on...</p>

Biofuels are often presented as a contribution towards the solution of the problems related to our strong dependency on fossil fuels, i.e. greenhouse effect, energy dependency, urban pollution, besides being a way to support rural development. In this paper, an integrated assessment approach is...

Material throughput is a means of measuring the so-called social metabolism, or physical dimensions of a society's consumption, and can be taken as an indirect and approximate indicator of sustainability. Material flow accounting can be used to test the dematerialisation hypothesis, the idea...

The use of multi-criteria evaluation tools in combination with participatory approaches provides a promising framework for integrating multiple interests and perspectives in the effort to provide sustainability. However, the inclusion of diverse viewpoints requires the “compression” of...

Abandoning fossil fuels and increasingly relying on low-density, land-intensive renewable energy will increase demand for land, affecting current global and regional rural–urban relationships. Over the past two decades, rural–urban relationships all over the world have witnessed...

Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) has become one of the most rapidly expanding crops in the world. Many countries have promoted its cultivation as part of a broader rural development strategy aimed at generating paid work and producing both export commodities and biofuels. However, oil palm expansion...

This paper applies the so-called Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM), based on Georgescu-Roegen's fund-flow model, to the Spanish region of Catalonia. It arrives to the conclusion that within the context of the end of cheap oil, the current development...