Anke Schaffartzik in the consortium of REMASS that is receiving Austrian Science Fund Emerging Field Grant "excellent=austria"

REMASS focuses on global supply chains in the face of rapidly increasing global use of natural resources and its environmental and social impacts. The research specifically acknowledges potential disruptions to these chains through, for example, wars, pandemics and climate extremes, and their impacts on resource use, sustainability, inequality and social wellbeing. REMASS will employ innovative approaches to research “social metabolism”, which refers to the analysis of resource flows, material stocks, such as buildings and infrastructure, and their contribution to society. The researchers will develop a global database focusing on three provisioning systems crucial for sustainability and social well-being: nutrition, housing and mobility. 

"The newly created database will make it possible to investigate how these three basic supply systems can be made more sustainable and socially just, as well as to analyze the effects of supply chain disruptions on transformation processes and inequalities at different levels, such as geography, income, gender, ethnicity, and so forth. With REMASS, we’ve outlined not just a research project, but an agenda for a new field of research, in which we bring together multiple extensive data sets on resource use, economic indicators and wellbeing using advanced modelling approaches, while simultaneously enabling on-the-ground qualitative research to shape these models and interrogate their results,” said Schaffartzik. “This sounds like what it is: an ambitious and somewhat daunting task that we will only be able to accomplish together, in collaboration.”