Comparar métodos

	Social Metabolism Analysis	Tapio Decoupling Analysis
Campo	Environmental Sociology	Environmental Sociology
Familia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Año de origen	1998	2005
Autor original	Marina Fischer-Kowalski (Vienna School of Social Ecology)	Petri Tapio (building on OECD decoupling indicators)
Tipo	Biophysical accounting pipeline for society's material and energy flows	Elasticity-based classification of growth-versus-pressure trajectories
Fuente seminal	Fischer-Kowalski, M. (1998). Society's Metabolism: The Intellectual History of Materials Flow Analysis, Part I, 1860-1970. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2(1), 61-78.	Tapio, P. (2005). Towards a theory of decoupling: degrees of decoupling in the EU and the case of road traffic in Finland between 1970 and 2001. Transport Policy, 12(2), 137-151.
Alias	Societal Metabolism Analysis, Material and Energy Flow Analysis (MEFA), Socio-Economic Metabolism, Social Metabolism Accounting	Decoupling Elasticity Analysis, Tapio Decoupling Index, OECD Decoupling Indicator, Growth-Pressure Decoupling
Relacionados	4	3
Resumen	Social metabolism analysis studies a society as if it were a living organism that takes in materials and energy from nature, transforms them, builds up stocks, and excretes wastes and emissions, characterizing this biophysical throughput through systematic accounting. The concept and its intellectual lineage were synthesized by Marina Fischer-Kowalski and colleagues at the Vienna School of Social Ecology in their two-part 1998 history of materials flow analysis, which traced the metabolism metaphor from nineteenth-century thinkers to its modern, quantitative form. The method draws a boundary around a socio-economic system, a country, region, or city, and accounts for the materials and energy entering it through domestic extraction and imports, the stocks accumulated in buildings and infrastructure, and the outputs released as wastes, emissions, and exports. Mass and energy balances ensure the accounts are internally consistent, yielding indicators such as domestic material consumption and per-capita material flow that describe the scale and structure of a society's resource use. By comparing throughput to economic output over time, the analysis examines whether economies are decoupling growth from material and energy use. Social metabolism is a foundational framework in social ecology and industrial ecology for assessing biophysical sustainability.	Decoupling analysis measures whether economic growth can proceed without a proportional increase in environmental pressure such as emissions, energy use, or resource consumption. The elasticity-based formulation introduced by Petri Tapio in 2005, refining the earlier OECD decoupling indicator, expresses the relationship as the ratio of the percentage change in environmental pressure to the percentage change in an economic driving force, typically GDP. This single decoupling elasticity is then sorted into a logical scheme of states — strong and weak decoupling, expansive and recessive coupling, and strong and weak negative decoupling — that distinguishes the desirable case where pressure falls while the economy grows from the undesirable case where pressure grows faster than the economy. Tapio's scheme has become a standard diagnostic for tracking progress toward green growth and sustainability.