Resource Efficiency: Potential and Economic Implications

Despite enormous progress in the past decades towards improving human prosperity and well-being, this has come at the lasting cost of degradation of the natural environment and depletion of natural resources. Meeting the needs of a growing and increasingly affluent population, will require natural resource extraction to increase from 85 to 186 billion tonnes by 2050. This can cause irreversible environmental damage and endanger the capacity of Earth to continue to provide resources which are essential for human survival and development. Analysis in the report shows that policies and initiatives to improve resource efficiency and tackle climate change can reduce global resource extraction by up to 28 per cent while also boosting the value of world economic activity by 1 per cent in 2050, against the baseline. Such policy actions can also cut global greenhouse gas emissions by around 60 per cent in 2050 relative to 2015 levels. This report has been produced by the UNEP’s International Resource Panel in response to a request by leaders of the G7 nations in the context of efforts to promote resource efficiency as a core element of sustainable development. The report conducts a rigorous survey to assess and articulate the prospects and solutions for resource efficiency. It considers how more efficient use of resources can contribute to economic growth, employment and development, at the same time as reducing the world’s use of materials, energy, biomass and water, and the resulting environmental impacts. The report documents many examples of best practices for increasing the resource efficiency of different sectors from countries around the world. The challenge for policy-makers is to learn from and scale up these good practices, and to conceive and implement a set of transformative policies that will enable countries to reap the associated social, environmental and economic benefits. Ambitious action to use resources in a more efficient and sustainable manner can help place the world on the right track to meet its commitments under the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Change Agreement, and thereby to realise a more equitable and sustainable future

A nanodosimetric model of radiation-induced clustered DNA damage yields

International audienceWe present a nanodosimetric model for predicting the yield of double strand breaks (DSBs) and non-DSB clustered damages induced in irradiated DNA. The model uses experimental ionization cluster size distributions measured in a gas model by an ion counting nanodosimeter or, alternatively, distributions simulated by a Monte Carlo track structure code developed to simulate the nanodosimeter. The model is based on a straightforward combinatorial approach translating ionizations, as measured or simulated in a sensitive gas volume, to lesions in a DNA segment of one-two helical turns considered equivalent to the sensitive volume of the nanodosimeter. The two model parameters, corresponding to the probability that a single ion detected by the nanodosimeter corresponds to a single strand break or a single lesion (strand break or base damage) in the equivalent DNA segment, were tuned by fitting the model-predicted yields to previously measured double-strand break and double-strand lesion yields in plasmid DNA irradiated with protons and helium nuclei. Model predictions were also compared to both yield data simulated by the PARTRAC code for protons of a wide range of different energies and experimental DSB and non-DSB clustered DNA damage yield data from the literature. The applicability and limitations of this model in predicting the LET dependence of clustered DNA damage yields are discussed