For two years in a row, Circle Economy produced the Circular Gap Report that is launched and presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos. This report is based on analyses of the material flows and consumption of the global economy, based on economic input/ouptut tables.

This year, the challenge was to also produce a national edition and we succeeded. Perhaps counterintuitively, making an input/output analysis for a country is substantially more difficult than for the world as a whole. Pretty much anything we don’t launch into space ourselves stays on earth, but for countries we have to take account of imports, exports and other sorts of losses. In a collaboration with Circle Economy, the BOKU institute in Austria and the Austrian national waste management agency, we devised a new methodology combining a consumption based and a production based analysis.

Barnebies’ role was to interpret the findings and manage the analytical team away from pitfalls, challenging assumptions and writing the conclusions & recommendations chapter.