The concept of environmental or carbon footprint is familiar to most people. The footprint concept has become a powerful framework in which to analyse and describe the indirect, often invisible, impacts of our economic activity on the environment. This becomes increasingly useful as globalisation changes our economy. Goods and services now often pass through extended production and supply chains before reaching the end consumer, involving environmental impacts at each transaction point along the way. Producing a car, for example, may involve iron ore mining in Western Australia, car assemblage in Japan, electronic parts imported from China, and thousands of other inputs. At first sight, analysing the environmental implications of such complex supply-chains seems impossibly complicated.
To assist in this process, the virtual Industrial Ecology Laboratory (IELab) was built by ISA with input from numerous institutions, initially as the Australian IELab; soon afterwards, funding was received to develop a separate, Global MRIO Lab. The IELab was a novel method for producing multi-region input-output (MRIO) tables hosted in a collaborative platform; information about the underlining principles of the original IELab is at this link.
Following the development of the Australian IELab (2014), IELabs were launched for China (2015), Indonesia (2017), Japan (2020), United States (2020) and Taiwan (2020), in addition to the Global MRIO Lab (2017); subsequently the (Global Resource Input-Output Assessment) GLORIA database was launched (2021), which was initially built and then developed for two United Nations programs to measure material flows and Sustainable Development Goals, and is also available via the IELab website. Further information about GLORIA is on our Publications page.
Individual country-level IELabs facilitate sub-national analysis, while global IELabs incorporate trade flows. Read more about the compilation of MRIO tables and the relative advantages offered by various approaches.
The IELab was created by ISA at the University of Sydney and is operated by UNSW; the IELab’s development was supported by the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources project (NeCTAR), Econsearch, The University of Queensland, Griffith University, Federation University Australia, the University of South Australia, the University of Melbourne and CSIRO.
The IELabs are available via: https://ielab.info/