Emergy-Based City’s Sustainability and Decoupling Assessment: Indicators, Features and Findings

Abstract

Decoupling human well-being and local economic growth from resources consumption and environmental degradation has been recognized as a common vision to meet global sustainability. This paper taking Shenyang city as studied case aims to measure the decoupling process by proposing a set of new emergy-based and efficiency-oriented indicators. Decoupling process was verified in period of 1995-2010, and five new indicators including economic efficiency, the environmental pressure, the emergy-based five-year yield efficiency, the investment cost for decoupling, and the job-opportunities cost for decoupling were developed and applied. The results indicate that decoupling in Shenyang shows an erratic appearance, the trajectory of economic growth, and environmental pressure show absolute decoupling, while that of economic growth and resources utilization shows frequentative bending; emergy-based economic efficiency has been improved and the environmental pressure decreased along with the economic growth but the relative job cost per unit remains almost at the same level. However, this isolated and methodology-oriented case study provided the open-mind understandings to policy-making, thus, a wider scale comparison between different cities should be carried out for more knowledge mining.

The Decoupling of Resource Consumption and Environmental Impact from Economic Growth in China: Spatial Pattern and Temporal Trend

“…In brief, as for the final energy consumption, the decoupling performance of energy consumption in 63% of the provinces in China show a decreasing trend and 37% of the provinces show an improving trend. The reason for this phenomenon is that China is still in the transforming phase from primary industrialization to modern industrialization; thus, the situation of fast economic growth triggered by vast volume energy consumption still exists at present and will last for years because of the effects of path dependence [36].…”

“…However, due to the non-linear characteristic of the time series of the decoupling indicator, which makes it is unable to simulate future changes in decoupling performance with simply linear regression analysis [11,36], few studies have focused on the temporal trend of decoupling performance. The Hurst exponent (H), which was originally proposed by Hurst to analysis the time series flow data of the Nile river, with theoretical improvements made by Mandelbrot and Wallis [37], is widely used to analyze the fractal behavior (or persistence) of a non-linear time series [38][39][40].…”

“…However, few studies have focused on exploring the temporal trend of the decoupling degree that would contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of decoupling performance. This might be due to the non-linear characteristic of decoupling degree dynamics in a long time series [11,36], which makes it impossible to simulate the trend of decoupling degree by using linear regression analysis. Moreover, most of the studies about China barely focus on the spatial pattern of decoupling performance in China, which is important for making differentiated and specific environmental policies that achieve the goal of environmental sustainability at the local level.…”

Special Edition: Environment in Sustainable Development

“…Of these a number of papers addressed the issue of decoupling head-on. Zhang et al [13] used a novel set of indicators (including emergy) to explore decoupling in Shenyang city, China, between 1995 and 2010 provide some sense of optimism with some indicators suggesting a decrease in pressure on the environment with economic growth. Kyle Knight and Juliet Schor [14] in their paper using carbon emissions as a key indicator of pressure on the environment also point to some evidence for a decoupling between economic growth and territorial emissions of carbon dioxide.…”

Emergy-Based Regional Socio-Economic Metabolism Analysis: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis and Decomposition Analysis

“…Besides, the MFA-based metabolism studies provide strong and consistent evidence of the increasing consumption of resources in most economies, even in those economies that have focused their policies on dematerializing economic growth [24]. Emergy analysis, developed by Odum [25], is a technique of quantitative analysis that determines the values of resources, services and commodities in a common unit of solar energy, which allows all resources to be compared on a fair basis [26]. Therefore, emergy-based metabolism analysis, rather than the mass content of differing resources in the MFA, can overcome the limits of MFA that we mentioned above [3].…”