Call for Abstracts

Organiser: Jennifer Kroeger

Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is now recognized as a critical inclusion in climate change mitigation. As the CDR market expands, newly developed accounting methodologies and protocols often utilize life cycle assessment (LCA) and related assessment tools to ensure net carbon removal and measure other environmental consequences. However, constructing life cycle models for CDR strategies that rely on functions and responses of natural systems is challenging from both a data and philosophical perspective. Researchers are left to decide how to discuss and quantify avoided impacts, co-benefits, and other ecosystem services that characterize these nature-based CDR strategies.

Previous industrial ecology (IE) meetings have highlighted work on technology-focused carbon capture, like Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Carbon Capture Utilization & Storage (CCUS), but there has been much less representation of work focusing on more nature-based CDR. This session will feature presentations utilizing IE tools to assess static and dynamic impacts of nature-based CDR, with an emphasis on how ecosystem co-benefits are integrated into IE studies. This session will also include a discussion of best practices for how the IE field can interact with the emerging carbon removal market to provide robust analyses for CDR. Strategies addressed in presentations may include forestation, biochar, enhanced weathering, and soil carbon restoration/sequestration. We welcome audience members working in this space, as well as individuals interested in learning more about this emerging topic.

Organiser: Matt Eckelman, Nick Watts

Healthcare represents a tenth of global GDP and is among the most energy- and material-intensive service sectors, but has received relatively little attention in the IE community. While sustainability efforts have traditionally been seen as potentially detracting from the primary mission of patient care, in the past five years healthcare has undergone a rapid shift in adopting and implementing sustainability goals, in large part led by clinicians. It is now recognized that climate change in particular represents the largest global threat to public health and that healthcare systems need to adapt their management and operations to respond, as well as mitigate their own substantial emissions, estimated at 5% of the global total for GHGs. One of the global centres guiding healthcare sustainability education and implementation work is the Centre for Sustainable Medicine at the National University of Singapore (NUS). In this session, representatives from NUS will describe their work to transform the typical drivers of resource use and waste in healthcare organisations and how clinicians and other healthcare stakeholders are changing practices to provide low-carbon care. In complement, the second half of the session will showcase emerging IE work on healthcare, from products to facilities to national systems. The two-panel format will demonstrate the large opportunities for action-oriented IE research in healthcare and how healthcare systems around the world are implementing solutions.

Organisers: Guochang Xu, Zhi Cao

Batteries represent a crucial vehicle for transitioning from a fossil fuel-dependent society to a sustainable energy future. They have revolutionized portable electronics and are pivotal for the decarbonization of transportation through battery-powered electric vehicles. However, the anticipated exponential growth in battery demand, primarily driven by the electric vehicle industry, poses significant sustainability challenges. The entire life cycle of batteries, from the extraction and processing of raw materials to manufacturing, use, and disposal, presents substantial environmental and economic concerns. Critical raw materials required for current battery chemistries are often scarce and not sourced sustainably, compounding issues related to non-sustainable manufacturing practices and end-of-life waste.

To address these challenges, it is insufficient to tackle the sustainability issues of batteries in isolation at different life cycle stages. Instead, a systems and holistic approach is necessary to develop truly sustainable solutions. This session will delve into the latest research, data, and case studies to address the following questions:

• What are the primary factors driving the anthropogenic metabolism of battery materials, and how can we enhance the accuracy of these estimations?
• How can circular economy principles enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of battery use, cascade utilization, and recycling processes, and motivate manufacturers to design batteries that are more recyclable and have extended life cycles?
• What strategies can be implemented at both management and technical levels to foster cleaner production models that ensure a continuous supply of battery materials while minimizing environmental impacts?

This session is designed to foster a robust exchange of ideas, experiences, and discussions on the sustainable management of automotive batteries. It aims to contextualize the future sustainability of the battery industry within a framework of carbon neutrality and introduce innovative scenario modelling techniques to project future material dynamics and environmental impacts.

Organisers: ISIE Education Subcommittee

The impact of our community critically depends on how we teach the next generation of industrial ecologists. Fortunately, our community hosts many proactive and creative teachers, who have developed many initiatives and resources. This session will provide a platform to share these resources and connect with fellow educators. The session will feature a series of inspiring lightning talks on a range of initiatives. As an educator, you will hear about the latest trends and ideas in teaching industrial ecology, and learn about practical resources, such as online courses, open-access teaching materials, teaching strategies, course design, exercises for assessment, and much more. The speakers are drawn from across the industrial ecology community and teach to various audiences at various levels. If you are an instructor in industrial ecology, this session will provide essential inspiration for your teaching.

Organisers: Charles Gillott, Danielle Densley Tingley, Jonathan Cullen, André Cabrera Serrenho, Rick Lupton

Globally, the built environment is responsible for 50% of extracted materials, 60% of generated waste and 40% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Meeting sustainable development targets within international carbon budgets therefore requires a detailed understanding of the resources stocked within, and flows into, between and beyond, the global built environment.

Despite a recent increase in the quality and quantity of material stock and flow analyses, resulting models are often limited solely to stocks or flows and rarely consider the international context in its entirety. Acknowledging the inherent interrelation of material stocks and flows, and increasing international resource and waste trade, this session will explore potential benefits and next steps in developing an integrated stock-flow model for the global built environment.

Adopting a workshop-style format, the session will include a mix of introductory presentations, roundtable discussions, plenary feedback and concluding remarks. Throughout this, the organisers and participants will explore the key drivers for, barriers to, and enablers of an integrated stock and flow model for the global built environment. This will include discussions on potential applications, data and method requirements, and necessary societal shifts. Within the session key roundtable inputs, plenary feedback and concluding remarks will be recorded by participants, organisers and delegated facilitators, enabling the synthesis of findings and their preparation for publication as an academic perspective paper.

This sessions target includes anyone working on, or interested in, material stock and flow modelling in the built environment. Alongside the organisers’ international research network, this session is expected to attract attendees from a diverse range of geographical and thematic backgrounds, including both within and beyond ISIE.

Organisers: Keagan Rankin, Simon van Lierde, Jason “Jake” Hawes

This session will concentrate on advancements and best practices in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) within industrial ecology (IE), with an emphasis on aligning these technologies with the goals and important questions of the IE community.

There has been a growth in exploratory applications of AI/ML in IE research, including tasks like improving geospatial stock analysis, imputing emissions inventories, and accelerating LCA. To ensure the appropriate, ethical, and efficient use of these exciting new tools, the IE community must 1) standardize best practices to improve reproducibility and avoid data leakage in AI/ML research and 2) ensure AI/ML use is aligned with the goals of the IE community and helping to answer important questions. Accordingly, this session will:

• Showcase cutting-edge applications of AI/ML tools to IE.
• Showcase best practices for ML research and ongoing efforts to develop benchmark datasets for IE methods (e.g. LCA, MFA, EEIO).
• Create on-going discussion on how to focus AI/ML use in IE towards answering realistic and important problems within the next 5-10 years (e.g. LCA automation, geospatial data collection).

The session structure will involve both talks and interactive discussion. The session will start with three rapid presentations on recent advancements in AI/ML use in IE. The session will then have a presentation that highlights efforts to create best practices for AI/ML research in IE, focusing on reproducibility, benchmark datasets, and estimating the environmental impact of AI/ML. Finally, there will be an open panel discussion on the future direction of AI/ML use in IE. The session aims to inform any IE researcher/practitioners who are starting to use AI/ML methods and would like to improve the robustness and relevance of their work.

Organisers: Glenn A. Aguilar-Hernandez, Bart van Hoof, Nobantu Mtimde, Ramzy Kahhat, Simran Talwar

The Global South faces unique challenges and opportunities related to sustainability and circular economy, making it essential to tailor policy and research suitable to unique local contexts and practices.

This special session proposes understanding and mapping the current landscape of Circular Economy (CE) research and initiatives, learning from the Industrial Ecology community. The focus will be on sharing perspectives from the Asia/Asia-Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean regions.

The outcomes will help acknowledge advancements, and identify critical knowledge gaps, which will culminate in the co-creation of an interconnected CE Research Agenda that recognises the mutual interdependence between the Global North and Global South.

Session participants will have the opportunity to engage in discussions and workshop activities to examine the adoption, advancements, challenges, and blind spots in CE research. By leveraging the expertise of our diverse IE community, we aim to highlight successful case studies, innovative strategies, and enhance science diplomacy and collaboration, whilst identifying areas where further research is needed. Our target audience is those IE colleagues (including researchers and practitioners) who work on or are interested in CE research in the Global South.

The session will facilitate a platform for networking among IE colleagues, fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange. Our ultimate goal is to co-create an interconnected research agenda that outlines elements necessary for an effective, inclusive, and just CE transition in these regions, ensuring that diverse perspectives are included in shaping the future CE research agenda of our community.

Organisers: Johan Andrés Vélez-Henao, Jan Streeck, Joël Millward-Hopkins, Jarmo Kikstra, Kaveri Ashok, Marlin Arnz, Vivien Fisch-Romito

Eradicating poverty while keeping ecological overshoot low and keeping environmental pressures within planetary boundaries is an enormous challenge. Large international commitments, such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), have sparked a lot of efforts in politics, society, and academia. However, the SDGs measure outcomes based on predefined targets but do not specify the essential prerequisites, that is, the products and services necessary to meet these goals. To address this gap, Rao and Min (2018) introduced the concept of decent living standards (DLS), a set of services considered fundamental for human well-being. The DLS framework allows one to estimate the energy and material requirements needed to achieve the SDGs related to well-being.

The body of literature on DLS is expanding from a focus on energy to include material needs and has been linked to key concepts such as the energy service cascade (Kalt et al., 2019) and the stock-flow-service nexus (Haberl et al., 2017). These ideas integrate material flow analysis with social and environmental factors to better understand issues such as inequality and the doughnut economics model. However, research that comprehensively analyses the minimum material prerequisites for a poverty eradication target which is more ambitious than conventional monetary-based targets (decent living standards for all) as well as their environmental impact and policy implications is still in its infancy.

This session aims to explore how the increasing literature body using the DLS framework has been applied and interpreted in various contexts while identifying research gaps and opportunities for collaboration. The intended audience includes scholars and professionals in industrial ecology, environmental, and social sciences, particularly those with an interest in well-being, inequality, and social justice, topics that are central to both national and international policy discussions.

The section is open to all types of research e.g., conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative research.

Organisers: Georg Schiller, Riyan Habeeb

In the global urban and environmental context, circular economy and resilience are key drivers for sustainable urban transformation. Rapid urbanization has increased pressure on natural resources for building construction and exacerbated risks from climate extremes. For example, resource-intensive urbanization has exacerbated the urban heat island effect and contributed to urban flooding through land sealing. Therefore, the integration of environmental risk management and efficient resource use is essential for a sustainable urban environment.

Sustainable Development Goal 11 aims to make cities more resilient and sustainable. However, despite the recognition of urbanization trends and environmental risks, current policies and practices are fall short in developing synergies between resilience and resource efficiency. Crucial to this is the lack of harmonization of timeframes for short- and long-term goals related to resilience and resource efficiency and circularity respectively.

Resilience addresses both short-term adaptation to immediate crises, like disaster recovery, and long-term adaptation to climate risks, but its focus is often on immediate recovery. Circularity, on the other hand, targets long-term sustainability by optimizing resource life cycles to reduce environmental impacts. Circularity’s long-term benefits, like reducing waste and resource strain, support resilience by fostering adaptive systems. However, short-term crisis responses, such as using non-circular materials, can conflict with circularity’s goals. Sustainable urban transformation prioritizes long-term systemic change, requiring alignment between resilience and circularity, especially in short-term adaptations.

This session aims to explore the tension between resilience and circularity, focusing on how to harmonize both approaches, particularly in terms of their temporal dimensions. It will address key areas of tension, often researched separately in industrial ecology, especially within sustainable urban systems and socio-economic metabolism section. The session is based on a comprehensive literature analysis that is being currently developed into a forum paper.

Organisers: Daniela Perrotti, Zhi Cao, Kangkang Tong

Recent reviews suggest a growing interest across the IE community in understanding and modelling the role of green infrastructure and nature-based solution (NBS) assessments in urban metabolism approaches. A variety of methods have been embraced to account for the complexity of green capital as metabolic organic/inorganic stocks (e.g., biomass, soil) and associated flows (e.g., energy/water/material provisioning and air/climate/water regulating ecosystem services) in cities. However, further research is needed toward generating consolidated spatially and temporally dynamic integrated frameworks to jointly assess metabolic requirements of green and built/grey infrastructure. Such a need is even more stringent when considering the accelerated pace of progress in natural capital valuation in ecological economics as well as recent breakthroughs on the conceptualisation and modelling of urban nature in urban and political ecology.

Singapore, in particular, has garnered global attention due to its extensive urban greening policy over recent decades while serving as a living lab for NBS experimentation. This has resulted in a growing interest across research and policy in assessing the sustainability of Singapore as the “Garden City” with respect to NBS benefits to urban communities, which makes the proposed session especially relevant for ISIE2025.

Building on the outcome of latest IE studies, the session will: i) review state-of-the-art modelling methods and frameworks for assessing NBS material requirements across urban scales (from the district to regional level), focusing on data availability, processing, modelling capacity and validation strategies across the IE community; ii) explore future research directions for integrating dynamic green and built infrastructure frameworks in metabolic assessments; iii) discuss the policy relevance of these frameworks, leveraging previous research findings and, if possible, ongoing experiences in Singapore.

Accordingly, our targeted audience includes IE researchers interested in NBS in urban metabolism, as well as, potentially, Singaporean authorities (urban planning, environmental, sustainability agencies).

Organiser: Gara Villalba

Bob Ayres was not only a founder of the field of Industrial Ecology, he was also one of the earliest contributors to Environmental Economics, giving rise to the field of Ecological Economics. He studied the implications of the interconnectedness of thermodynamics, economics, and materials, strongly motivated to know how to best realize a transition to sustainability. This session will be a tribute to him and to his work, and will welcome contributions from researchers studying the intersection of technology, physics, economy, and sustainability showing innovation in methodology and impact to policy development, business development, academic advancement, or environmental stewardship.

Organiser: Tim Baynes

The motivation of this session is to recognize the application of industrial ecology research and insights in corporate decision making, now and into the future. This includes process change, managing value chain and procurement, and finance and investment. These aspects have been elevated in prominence by recent Scope 3 mandatory climate disclosure requirements, and other regulations that require scientific rigor on corporate carbon accounting and sustainability statements.

The interaction is possibly more pervasive than those in corporate sustainability, or industrial ecology, realize and the aim of the session is to reveal existing explicit connections and allow for an open discussion on potential opportunities responding to the climate transition.

The target audience may include applied industrial ecologists, sustainability practitioners and students. There are an increasing number of industrial ecologists and corporate decision makers who are working together on climate disclosure, action and sustainable practices. Also graduating industrial ecology students wanting to see a path to commercial application of their industrial ecology expertise.

Organisers: Stijn van Ewijk, Weiwei Mo, Ella Jennings, Harri Kalimo, Antti Jukka, Ryu Koide, Reid Lifset

Industrial ecology is the science of sustainability and circular economy. But how does industrial ecology science inform government action on sustainability? In this special session, leading policy experts will reflect on the linkages between industrial ecology and major environmental policy programs, with a focus on Singapore and South-East Asia. The aim of the session is two-fold. First, to highlight opportunities and best practices for better evidence-based policymaking in policy areas underpinned by industrial ecology. Second, to bring new audiences to the ISIE biennial conference and support networking opportunities between them and the traditional membership of industrial ecologists.

The speakers will include local or regional policymakers or academics in the policy sciences that focus on industrial ecology topics, such as waste, circularity, and foot printing. The session will offer of a blend of activities (presentations, discussion, Q&A) to share and discuss ideas for analyzing and strengthening the industrial ecology science-policy interface. The target audience includes any industrial ecologist interested in enhancing their role in supporting better policies. At the same time, the session will be a means to broaden the attendance of the ISIE conferences by inviting policy-specialist guest speakers and their associates, a group that is usually under-represented at ISIE events and offer networking opportunities between industrial ecologists and policymakers and policy researchers.

Organisers: Huijuan Dong, Jinhua Li

This session will be a unique combination and opportunity to discuss circular economy and multi-factors nexus issues facing countries and regions around the world and to share the most recent ideas, outcomes, and practices in this field. It will also be a platform for collaboration among researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers across the world to make a lasting contribution to this field. The session will focus on topics related to circular economy and multi-factors nexus, including but not limited to circular economy methods, circular economy case studies and applications, water-energy nexus, water-energy-food nexus, water-energy-carbon nexus, water-energy-carbon-economy nexus, water-energy-food-carbon nexus, water-energy-food-waste nexus, low carbon recycling system. The target audience of this session include researchers, professionals, academics and students in related fields.

Organisers: Simron J. Singh, Andrea Thorenz, Lynette Cheah

Islands face compound events and multiple risks, making them especially vulnerable to global warming impacts like sea-level rise, flooding, droughts, and hurricanes. As such, island nations consistently rank high on a range of risk and climate vulnerability indices. At the same time, maladaptive practices—such as coastal infrastructure development, high import dependence, undiversified exports, inefficient waste management, and centralized energy systems—further exacerbate these challenges. IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report recognizes the urgency of the challenges faced by small islands and the need for transformational adaptation strategies for small islands.

Yet, islands present unique opportunities for Industrial Ecology research, serving as ideal “real-world laboratories” due to their well-defined social and natural boundaries. This makes them prime sites for sustainability research and transformative practices. Understanding island metabolism is crucial for building sustainable, resilient communities by assessing import dependencies, exploring self-sufficiency pathways, and implementing strategies to minimize waste and emissions. It also sheds light on scale interactions such as the effects of external factors like climate change and globalization on island ecosystems.

This special session invites research that advances both foundational knowledge and policy-oriented solutions for transforming island sustainability. We welcome contributions that explore topics such as resource self-sufficiency, food and energy security, sustainable water systems, disaster risk reduction, waste management, resilient infrastructure, and environmental justice. Relevant frameworks may include, but are not limited to, circular economy, socio-metabolic analysis, risk and vulnerability assessment, industrial symbiosis, decoupling, life-cycle approaches, citizen science, material recoverability, green infrastructure, and nature-based solutions.

Organisers: Shauhrat Chopra, Thomas Elliot

Urban transitions towards sustainability necessitate a complex interplay between resilience and sustainability across critical infrastructure systems, including energy, transport, and water. While pursuing sustainability goals, cities must also maintain and enhance their resilience to shocks and disruptions. This can create trade-offs, as strategies that enhance one aspect may negatively impact the other. This special session explores the resilience-sustainability nexus in coupled urban infrastructure transitions, focusing on understanding and navigating these trade-offs. We are particularly interested in identifying potential socio-ecological tipping points (STPs) – moments of rapid and potentially irreversible change – within and between interconnected systems, and how these tipping points can either accelerate or hinder progress towards both resilience and sustainability.

The session aims to bridge the gap between social and technical science perspectives, fostering a deeper understanding of how to effectively navigate these complex trade-offs and achieve both resilient and sustainable urban futures. Not limited to energy transitions, the scope includes agricultural and dietary transitions, transport modal transitions, and the ways in which positive STPs can be facilitated and transcended.

This session will specifically address the following questions:

• How can we identify and analyze trade-offs between resilience and sustainability in coupled urban systems (energy, transport, water)?
• How can systems modeling approaches, such as system dynamics (SD) and ABM, be used to explore STPs?
• What are the key social and technical factors that exacerbate or mitigate these trade-offs?
• How do interdependencies between infrastructure systems affect the likelihood and impact of STPs related to both resilience and sustainability?
• How can policy interventions and technological innovations be designed to leverage positive tipping points and mitigate negative ones, considering both resilience and sustainability goals?"

Organisers: Arnold Tukker, Shenghui Cui, Roy Remme, Mingming Hu

Sustainability of urban systems is dependent on many factors, including not only the types of material and energy, modes of mobility, but also the sensible arrangement of urban green spaces, so called green infrastructure (GI). GI, such as green roofs, parks, and urban farms, can play an important role in reducing urban challenges such as climate change, public health risks, food security, and biodiversity loss. GI is often touted to be a multifunctional urban element that offers ecosystem services such as heat mitigation, food production, flood prevention, and conserves or even increases biodiversity simultaneously. However, an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms of GI to deliver the wanted multifunctionality and how GI could be planned along the urban built environment development to reduce the need for more monofunctional technological solutions is not fully understood.

In this session we will explore how different features of GI and its relation to the built environment contribute to the wanted multifunctionality of urban green spaces and overall urban sustainability. The session presents lessons from the MultiGreen project in which academic and societal partners from China and the Netherlands co-created and tested tools for GI analysis in different cities. We will explore cases from different geographic contexts, different GI types, and different challenges that are being addressed, in the larger context of urban sustainability through an interdisciplinary lens.

This session targets on audience from practice, who are looking for green city development theories, and from academia, who develop knowledge to enhance urban sustainability through interdisciplinary learning based on Industrial Ecology, Urban Ecology, Urban Economy and Spatial Planning.

Organisers: Andrea Bartolini, Pieter Herthogs

ISIE 2025 brings together presenters employing a diverse range of approaches and methodologies, appealing to various researchers and encompassing a wide array of sub-fields within urban sciences, each defined by distinct definitions and terminologies.

The conference theme, Interconnectivity, highlights the critical need to combine and integrate approaches that enable us to study, understand, and ultimately address our increasing impact on the environment and other earth systems. Achieving this integration requires interoperability, especially in terms of knowledge and data, to build truly interconnected and multi-disciplinary research efforts and applications.

Ontologies have proven to be valuable tools in achieving and enhancing interoperability across diverse knowledge bases. They can act as common languages, bridging different or partially overlapping domains and enabling cross-disciplinary research and applications development by formally and explicitly defining knowledge.

We have developed OntoUrbanMetabolism (OUM), an ontology to describe anthropogenic resource use within the urban environment using formal definitions of key concepts and relationships. It has been specifically designed to be able to represent and interlink a broad range of conference themese spanning domains, resources and materials, as well as temporal and geographical dimensions.

The objective of this special session is to provide participants (and the ISIE community at large) with a foundational understanding of OUM, including its features and the rationale behind its creation, while illustrating its potential impact across various fields through the dissemination of tools and materials. Our goal is to foster engagement and lay the groundwork for ongoing conversations about the potential of OUM, and ontologies more broadly, to enhance interoperability within industrial ecology and related disciplines.

A viewable version of OUM and its key components is available at this link. The visualization at the link is an example of one of the pieces of material to be provided to the session attendees.

Organisers: Alessandro Manzardo, Junzhang Wu

Climate change presents significant environmental, economic, and social challenges that compel industries to adopt innovative solutions for sustainable and competitive development. Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) has emerged as a comprehensive methodology to evaluate the sustainability performance of products and processes. However, its widespread adoption is hindered by challenges such as extensive data requirements, high implementation costs, and concerns about the reliability of results for decision-making.

This session aims to explore how Digital Technologies (DT) can empower LCSA to facilitate a sustainable industrial transition. By integrating DT into LCSA, we can address existing challenges and enhance the methodology's effectiveness and efficiency. The session will delve into critical areas including:

• Smart sensors: Innovations in data collection and visualization to improve accuracy and efficiency.
• Internet of Things (IoT): Streamlining LCSA processes through interconnected devices and systems.
• Blockchain technologies: Enhancing data management and transparency with distributed ledger systems.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI): Supporting data collection, impact assessment, and results interpretation.
• Barriers to adoption: Addressing challenges and obstacles in implementing DT in sustainability assessments.
• Enabling life cycle thinking: Leveraging DT as enablers for life cycle thinking-related methods in industrial transition.

Through expert presentations and interactive discussions, participants will gain insights into the latest advancements in DT applications within LCSA, practical case studies, and strategies to overcome implementation barriers.

This session is designed for sustainability professionals, industrial managers, researchers, and policymakers interested in the intersection of digital technologies and sustainability assessment. By attending, decision-makers will be equipped to reorient strategic, data-driven decision-making processes toward the twin transition of sustainable and digital industries.

Organisers: Stefanie Hellweg, Pieter Herthogs

Circular Economy (CE) is widely acknowledged as a key concept to guide the development of methods and tools that help lower embodied emissions of materials in the building sector. However, the extent of possible emission reductions and the effectiveness of different CE strategies in different contexts are not yet clear. Hereby, crucial aspects in the transition towards a circular economy, such as the future flows of reused resources, the environmental benefits, the value exchanges between actors, or the socio-technical implementation pathways, need to be considered from a urban systemic perspective.

Urban harvesting is based on the idea that digital (industrial ecology tools) can help to map urban material resources in space and time, enabling an economically and environmentally beneficial circular use of these resources in the building stock. Therefore, resources can be “harvested” in a structured and well-planned manner.

The concept of urban harvesting has been applied in the “Circular Future Cities” project within the Singapore-Swiss Future Cities Laboratory Global program. Frameworks and tools for information management were developed to enable a move from a system of urban mining to one of urban harvesting. These digital tools (1) inform policies about the potential greenhouse gas savings of CE strategies in construction and hence to help set the right priorities and (2) facilitate circular design and create systems for incentives and marketplaces to make the CE happen. In this interactive special session, the developed digital tools from this and other projects and their applications will be discussed and future research needs identified. The target audience is industrial ecologists with a background in urban systems.

Questions to be discussed include:

• Is urban harvesting a useful framework ?
• Are digital tools useful to identify valuable resources in the building stock, plan their circular use and facilitate a trusted exchange of materials for circular future cities?
• What are research needs to enable the implementation of urban harvesting?

Organisers: Alessio Miatto, Heinz Schandl, Tomer Fishman

This special session continues the series of very successful experiences of the sessions on the stocks and flows of the built environment that were held in previous ISIE conferences.

The spatial distribution of materials is increasingly critical in understanding the potential for circularity, urban mining, and urban climate change interfaces – we need to know not only which and how many materials, but also where they are. This special session focuses on Spatially Explicit Material Flow and Stock Analysis (MF&SA), with an emphasis on regional stocks and flows. By incorporating geographic contexts, researchers and policymakers can better understand resource availability, flows between regions, and the potential for enhancing circularity and sustainability.

The authors of this submission serve as organizers and moderators. The objectives of this session are to:

• Showcase cutting-edge research methods and case studies in spatially explicit MF&SA, such as remote sensing, big data, multi-scale spatial analysis, spatial configurations, uncertainty assessment, and the study of underexplored and underrepresented locations.
• Highlight challenges and opportunities in quantifying regional material stocks and flows.
• Foster dialogue among interested researchers on integrating geospatial tools with MFA frameworks.
• Explore policy implications and how spatial data can support regional resource management and circular economy initiatives.
• Identify community-wide joint research interests and set an MF&SA research agenda.

This special session is expected to be a highly productive event for those actively engaged in the study of the built environment and will also be attractive to everyone in the wider circular economy efforts.

Organiser: Energy Studies Institute, National University of Singapore

This special session aims to foster discussions around innovative approaches and solutions for reducing the carbon footprint of buildings and infrastructure from the whole building life cycle approach, advancing the agenda for sustainable development. The primary objective is to bring together leading experts, practitioners, and policymakers to share insights and strategies for decarbonizing the built environment. We seek to identify best practices, explore technological advancements, and develop collaborative frameworks for implementation across diverse contexts. Additionally, this session aims to produce actionable recommendations that will guide future policies and initiatives. This session targets a diverse audience, including architects, urban planners, engineers, policymakers, researchers, and sustainability advocates. By engaging a multidisciplinary group, we seek to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange that can lead to innovative solutions for the urgent challenge of decarbonizing the built environment. Participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the complexities involved and valuable connections to advance their work in sustainability.