Emergy Synthesis for Three Main Industries in Wuyishan City, China

Abstract

Emergy synthesis is an objective method for evaluating the resource consumption by industrial development and the resulting environmental impacts. In this study, we apply emergy synthesis to account for the energy and material flows of three main industries in China's Wuyishan City, i.e. the tourism, tea, and bamboo industries. We calculate seven indices: renewable input ratio, emergy self-support ratio, emergy investment ratio, emergy density, emergy money ratio, emergy yield ratio, and environmental loading ratio. The results show that the continuous development of tourism industry is mainly resulted from the increase in its purchased resources, the tea industry's development has been relatively stable, and the bamboo industry depends greatly on non-renewable resources but has considerable development potential. The results suggest that tourism is the most environment-friendly one. Based on our analysis, we propose two sustainable development strategies: the promotion of intercropping in tea and bamboo plantations and the development of an advanced value-added bamboo production chain.

Correlation Analysis between Land Use/Cover Change and Air Pollutants—A Case Study in Wuyishan City

“…From the perspective of LUCC, forest and cultivated land were the largest land use type in Wuyishan, which relates to the economic structure of Wuyishan. This finding was consistent with Yang et al (2011), whereby tourism has continued to develop, and the tea industry has remained stable in Wuyishan [46]. However, in Northeast China, in order to meet the needs of economic development, population growth, and industrialization, many cities have relied on continuous expansion which is leads to the increased built-up of land area [47][48][49].…”

“…The increasing demand for built-up areas caused the disappearance of a large amount of cultivated land and forests surrounding the cities [50]. During 2014 and 2017, the change in water area was relatively stable, mainly due to increased investment in water conservation, environmental protection of water ecology, and energy conservation in China [46].…”

Fuzzy interval programming for energy and environmental systems management under constraint-violation and energy-substitution effects: A case study for the City of Beijing

“…Meanwhile, many challenges (e.g., energy technologies and environmental regulations are changing rapidly) remain in the planning of energy systems over a long-time horizon. These lead to multiple uncertainties in relevant processes of energy decision-making (Diwekar et al, 1997;Gritsevskyi and Nakićenovi, 2000), which are hardly tackled by most of the previous studies, (b) multiple risks are existing in energy management systems such as financial and operational ones, potentially resulting in a series of economic and environmental consequences, which have been generally ignored or simplified by previous studies, (c) most of the previous inexact optimization methods (such as interval and fuzzy linear programming) were effective in dealing with uncertainties in energy systems planning (Birant, 2011;Cai et al, 2008Cai et al, , 2009cDong et al, 2011Dong et al, , 2012Huang et al, 2010;Li et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2000;Yang et al, 2011), however, they could not help conduct violation analysis of flexible constraints to identify and address the inherent risks of energy systems, and (d) there were no reports on incorporation of substitution effects among different energy resources within the management of energy systems under different violation risks and multiple uncertainties.…”

Eco-benefits assessment on urban industrial symbiosis based on material flows analysis and emergy evaluation approach: A case of Liuzhou city, China

“…To date, there have been emerging studies focusing on emergy evaluation on urban metabolism (Huang et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2011b), waste recycling (Giannetti et al, 2013;Song et al, 2013;Yuan et al, 2011;Zhang et al, 2011a), forest ecosystem (Lu et al, 2011;Tilley and Swank, 2003), eco-industrial park (Geng et al, 2014;Geng et al, 2010), circular economy (Geng, 2011;Geng et al, 2013), etc. Some research works have also been carried out to analyze the industrial system (Geng et al, 2010;Yang et al, 2003;Yang et al, 2011). However, in general, to our best knowledge, emergy has been still rarely applied in evaluation urban industrial symbiosis, especially in industrial cities.…”