REMASS (Resilience and Malleability of Social Metabolism)

"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.”

Crises such as wars, pandemics and climate extremes destabilise global supply chains. But how do they affect resource utilisation, sustainability, inequality and social well-being? REMASS addresses these questions with the help of new approaches to researching societal metabolism, i.e. resource flows, material stocks (for example in buildings and infrastructures) and their services for society. REMASS creates a high-resolution database on societal metabolism. This makes it possible to quantify the resilience of metabolism to disruptions in supply chains using big data approaches in complexity research. REMASS is analysing the shapeability of resource use in three important supply systems (food, housing, mobility) and identifying key actors, decision-making processes and power relations.