Tomer Fishman is associate professor of industrial ecology at the institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University. He is interested in the sustainability questions related to the stuff we accumulate in our societies – our material stocks of products, buildings, infrastructures – questions like how do we use these resources, where do they come from and where they go after use, what are their impacts, how did they accumulate in the past and what could they look like in the future? Towards this, he develops and advances the methods of material flow and stock analysis.

More information about Tomer Fishman

Professional experience

Tomer Fishman is associate professor of industrial ecology at the institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University. He has extensive international work and study experience including in Nagoya University, Japan; Hebrew University and Reichman University, Israel; and Yale University, USA.

At the CML, he is the co-leader of the Institute’s Resources Research Program, and he teaches courses including the Material Flow Analysis course in the Industrial Ecology MSc program. He has been involved in supervision, advising, tutoring, and training of PhD candidates and postdocs throughout his professional career.

Tomer places great emphasis on scientific networks, leading and contributing to multiple concurrent regional and international collaborations at the forefront of the field including several EU Horizon projects, reports of the United Nations Environment Program and International Resource Panel, book chapters, and many collaboratively coauthored journal articles with multiple partners across the world.

He has been an active member of the International Society for Industrial Ecology ISIE) for many years, currently serving as an elected board member of the society, and formerly in roles including the co-chair of the conferences and events committee, president of the student section, and board member of the socioeconomic metabolism section. He has organized and chair international academic conferences such as the 2023 ISIE conference in Leiden.

Research topic

Tomer’s research is focused towards understanding the materials that accumulate in our buildings, vehicles, infrastructure, consumer products, and green technologies, and how they form the interlinkages between well-being, economic development, and the environment. This research is interdisciplinary by its nature. It combines sustainability science’s quantitative “workhorse” methods such as material flow analysis, traditionally using economic-like accounting and statistics, with innovative methods and analytical approaches from such diverse fields as geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing, econometrics, statistics and data analytics, and signal processing. These integrative methods expand the ways in which Tomer and his research team are able to account, model, and analyze the accumulation of material stocks and their relations to socioeconomic patterns across the world.

Thus, Tomer’s research agenda expands material flow and stock analysis to answer not only which and how much materials are used, but to answer why: to what ends are they used, why does society accumulate certain types of materials, why are they amassed in certain locations and not others, and how can the strong coupling trends between material flows and development be untangled through sufficiency and efficiency.

His current topics include:

• Material stocks as provisioning systems of societal services for wellbeing, including access, development, and distribution vis-à-vis their environmental and sustainability challenges.
• Mapping the materials stocked in the built environment using geospatial (GIS) analysis and remote sensing towards understanding their spatial characteristics.
• City-, country- and global-scale drivers, histories, scenarios, and forecasts of material stock & flow processes with dynamic models.
• Demand, supply, and circular use of critical materials in emerging technologies such as electronics, vehicles, and renewable energy systems.
• Estimation of the potentials and pitfalls of resource efficiency and the circular economy.

Publications