ISIE-SEM conference 2024, Beijing

This August, I had the chance to head out to Beijing for the Industrial Ecology Socio-Economic Metabolism (ISIE-SEM) conference with fellow Refficiency members Jonathan Cullen and Fanran Meng. This conference is the biennial gathering focussed on material flow analysis, which seeks solutions to reduce the environmental impacts of industry whilst maintaining a sufficient quantity of goods for economic prosperity. The hosting of the conference in Beijing was a great opportunity to see a lot of work from Asian countries that is not typically known about in Europe. In particular, Gang Liu’s group at Peking University are working on some very interesting topics around managing the environmental impacts related to the huge quantity of low-carbon electricity generation required to meet China’s future energy needs. Compared to the previous conference in 2022, the supply of critical materials, necessary for the deployment of low-carbon electricity, has become one of the primary topics. This was a sentiment shared by researchers from across the world and supports the rising importance of materials such as lithium and nickel in a world moving towards solar panels, wind turbines and batteries as main components of their electricity grids.

The work we presented at this conference covered the need for the consideration of uncertainty in environmental impact assessment. This follows our paper that showed that not considering uncertainties in emissions due to the petrochemical industry can result in misleading assessments and slow down decarbonisation. Although, automation was not discussed at length in the conference generally, our work showing how machine learning can help with filling in data gaps and we are in discussions for future collaboration with researchers at Tsinghua University. 

Photo: Luke Cullen