Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

The adventure continues!

The start of STEEP as an exploratory action in 2010 constituted a significant thematic change for all its members. This risky adventure was successfully consolidated in 2015, with the acceptance of STEEP as a full project-team. The adventure continues!

Various significant contributions

In other respects, two important results have been obtained this year on the ecological accounting front. First, a generic method of evaluation of environmental pressures from material flows has been developed and published (paper in press at the time of writing). Second, the errors associated to the national transport database which is heavily used in material flow analysis have been quantified; this work will be published in 2016 but is eagerly awaited by a number of researchers and agencies, as the disaggregated error is not evaluated in the database itself.

As a by-product of its investment in the ESNET project (Ecosystem Services Network), the team has developed an important expertise on the methodological aspects of LUCC modelling. This expertise has turned into a theoretical analysis of the foundations of LUCC theory itself, as important methodological flaws and their theoretical cures have been identified in the course of the project. These methodological and theoretical advances will be submitted to publication within the coming year.

Finally, our benchmarking tools designed for climate negotiations have been used by the “Groupe Interdisciplinaire sur les Contributions Nationales” (GICN) which has been mandated by french ministry of Sustainable Development to prepare the climate change conference COP21 at Paris. Some contributions have been presented at the Side Events of COP 21, the 2nd of December 2015. Contributions have been published in a special working paper [11] .