Over the last several thousand years of human life on Earth, agricultural settlements became urban cores, and these regional settlements became tightly connected through infrastructures transporting people, materials, and information. This global network of urban systems, including ecosystems, is the anthroposphere; the physical flows and stocks of matter and energy within it form its metabolism. This book offers an overview of the metabolism of the anthroposphere, with an emphasis on the design of metabolic systems. It takes a cultural historical perspective, supported with methodology...

Since the first issue of the handbook was published in October 2003, the field of material flow analysis (MFA) has developed rapidly, including hundreds of MFA studies all over the globe. MFA methodology has become a widely used technique in environmental management, resources management, and waste management. Today, most MFA done on a global basis uses the MFA methodology described in this handbook, because the methodology offers a concise, transparent, reproducible, and well-accepted framework for performing MFAs and substance flow analyses (SFAs).