A Comprehensive Material Flow Account for Lao PDR to Inform Environmental and Sustainability Policy

Modern environmental and sustainability policy that acknowledges the linkages between socioeconomic processes and environmental pressures and impacts, and designs policies to decouple economic activity from environmental pressures and impacts, requires a sophisticated and comprehensive knowledge base. The concept of industrial metabolism provides a sound conceptual base, and material flow accounting—including primary material inputs and outflows of waste and emissions—provides a well‐accepted operationalization. Studies presenting a comprehensive material flow account for a national economy are rare, especially for developing countries. Countries such as Lao People's Democratic Republic (Lao PDR or Laos) face dual objectives of improving the material standard of living of their people while managing natural resources sustainably and mitigating adverse environmental impacts from growing resource throughput. Our research fills a knowledge gap, presents a comprehensive account of material inputs and outflows of waste and emissions for the Lao PDR national economy, and applies the accounting approach for a low‐income economy in Asia. We present a material balance for the years 2000 and 2015. For this research, we used data from Lao PDR national statistics and the accounting guidelines of the European Statistical Office (Eurostat), which pioneered the use of material flow data as part of its official statistical reporting. We demonstrate the feasibility of the accounting approach and discuss the robustness of results using uncertainty analysis conducted with statistical approaches commonly used in the field of industrial ecology, including Gauss's law of error propagation and Monte Carlo simulation. We find that the fast‐changing scale and composition of Lao PDR material flows, waste, and emissions presents challenges to the existing policy capacity and will require investment into governance of changed patterns of material use, waste disposal, and emissions. We consider the data analysis sufficiently robust to inform such a change in policy direction.