Dr Marina Fischer-Kowalski is a Professor and former Director of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vienna. She also chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of the Potsdam Institute on Climate Impact Research, in Germany, and is Vice President of the European Society of Ecological Economics. She developed a model of society-nature interactions, which incorporates analysis of resource use and environmental impacts from population and economic growth. Her social metabolism approach has guided the development of a consistent system for material flow accounting, which is now incorporated in EU statistical accounting. It has also been adopted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and many Asian countries.
Dr Fischer-Kowalski serves on the IRP’s Decoupling Working Group, and co-authored the report, Decoupling Natural Resource Use and Environmental Impacts from Economic Growth. She also coordinated review of the biofuels report. She presented at the 18th session of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development in 2010, at Rio+20 in 2010, and made a keynote address at the World Resources Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2009.
She serves as President and was a founder of the International Society for Industrial Ecology. She is an editorial board member of the Journal of Industrial Ecology and an advisory-board member of the journal Conservation and Society. In addition to her extensive published work in books and academic journals, Dr Fischer-Kowalski is a frequent public speaker on sustainable resource management at major global conferences and academic societies. Dr Fisher-Kowalski earned a PhD in sociology from the University of Vienna, in Austria.
Contributed to the following reports
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Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity (with database link)
Growing concern about assuring affordable, equitable and environmentally sustainable access to natural resources is well founded. In this report we show global natural resource use trends and propose indicators for evidence-based policy formulation.
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International Trade in Resources
International trade is indispensable for countries to meet demand for resources not available, accessible or affordable domestically. This report looks at implications of rapidly rising trade flows for global resource and environmental efficiency.
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Assessing Biofuels
This report provides a robust assessment of key problems of production and use of biomass for energy purposes and options for more efficient and sustainable production and use of biomass.
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Decoupling Natural Resource Use and Environmental Impacts from Economic Growth
We are using unsustainable amounts of the Earth’s natural resources. We need to improve the rate of resource productivity (“doing more with less”) faster than the economic growth rate. This is the notion behind “decoupling”.