Material Flow Account And Resource Efficiency Revolution Of China

The industrial development in the past 200 years has created great wealth. In the meantime, human beings have being exploiting the natural resources and resulting in many problems such as energy crisis, resources shortage, environmental pollution and degeneration of ecological system function. These problems have brought about huge impact on human own welfare and development. Human have been aware of the evil consequence caused by destroying environment and started to research the sustainable development. In order to assess the sustainable development, many kinds of methods and indicators are brought forward and developed, in which, Metabolism Theory gives the basic thinking to study the relationship between social-economy system and ecological system. Resource efficiency revolution is a main direction to achieve the sustainable development. Material Flow Account (MFA) can quantify the scale of social metabolism and the indicators derived from MFA can provide information about resources efficiency of social-economic system.Now China is in overall industrialized period and economy is being developed fast. The amount of resources consumption is huge, but Chinese resource reserves are not abundant. At the same time, the pressure from 1300 million populations and the contradiction between resource demand and supply make china face the greater challenge than other countries do. To guarantee the economic development in the range of long-term biological capacity to achieve sustainable development, the state of resource and environment should be monitored closely and resources efficiency should be studied so that the reasonable target of resource efficiency revolution can be established while china is devoting to the fast economic development. Indicators are needed for this. MFA is fit for that and has been taken much concern and used in recent years by many countries.This paper introduces the method to compile the national level MFA and calculated and analyzed the indicators derived from MFA of China during 1990-2002. It indicates that Chinese Direct Material Input efficiency is lower compared with developedcountries, but it was increasing in the past decades and relative dematerialization occurred in china. Based on the goal of the average growth rate per year of GDP per capita and the predicted value of Chinese population from National Population and Family Planning Commission of China in the future 50 years, the Direct Material Input efficiency of china in 2050 should five or ten times higher than that in present in order to remain the quantity of Direct Material Input same as 2002 and the established economic growth rate, i.e. the average growth rate per year of Direct Material Input efficiency should be 3.35% or 4.85%. The growth rate of Direct Material Input efficiency in the past eight years prove that realizing this target is possible.