A sustainable society is the result of many different development strategies. These strategies include technical solutions like electric vehicles and renewable energies but also economic incentives, legal regulations, and changing social norms. Together, these strategies will transform society's biophysical basis to a more sustainable state. We help to design this transformation by estimating the maximal global emissions savings potential of specific strategies, by assessing their consequences on humans, industry, and nature, and by studying interactions between strategies. We model the biophysical basis of society as complex industrial ecosystem, focusing on industrial processes, especially those for metal production and refining, as the metal industries alone account for about one third of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions.