Emergy-based indicators of regional environmental sustainability: A case study in Shanwei, Guangdong, China

To build or not to build? Megaprojects, resources, and environment: An emergy synthesis for a systemic evaluation of a major highway expansion

“…The annual distances covered by passenger cars and freight vehicles refer to year 2015 -representative of the traffic flow in the six-year period going from the second semester of 2010 to the first semester of 2016 (AISCAT, 2010-2016); according to such data, the same traffic volume is considered for both scenarios, since no increase has been registered nor -to the best knowledge of the authors -foreseen. Data on the composing materials of an average passenger car come from Lou et al (2015); data of freight vehicles are also based on this, yet adjusted according to a reference average mass of 2.48 tons per truck (Federici et al, 2008). Useful lifetimes for passenger cars and trucks are respectively assumed as 150,000 km and 1,000,000 km.…”

How to assess urban development potential in mountain areas? An approach of ecological carrying capacity in the view of coupled human and natural systems

“…The first one is the resource supply and demand balance method that focuses on ecosystem function and characterizes the absolute size of ECC through comparing resource supply and demand from the carrier and the carrying target. The ecological footprint method (Peng et al, 2015;Wackernagel and Rees, 1996), energy analysis (Lou et al, 2015), and net primary productivity method (NPP) (Sutton et al, 2012;Thebault et al, 2008) all belong to this category. The second one is the index system method which reifies ecosystem information based on several theoretical frameworks such as "pressure-state-response" (PSR) (Wei et al, 2014;Zheng et al, 2015), "pressure-state-impact-response" (PSIR) (Lockie et al, 2005), and "driving force-pressure-state-impact-response" (DPSIR) (de Jonge et al, 2012).…”

Review of Emergy Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment: Coupling Development Perspective

“…At present, human production and consumption activities are completely dependent on the continuous supply of natural ecosystems, which are inherently complex and consist of several highly correlated subsystems. In the early stage, it was impossible to achieve quantitative research on natural ecosystems due to the lack of relevant theoretical research foundations [1]. In the middle of the 20th century, Odum et al proposed the emergy analysis (EMA) theory based on theories of natural system energy control, ecology, and system theory [2].…”