This study integrates emergy evaluation with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to investigate the renewable resources, the cost of food consumption, and the solarshare of Taiwan in 2006. Taiwan is an island country with limited natural resources and high population density; consequently, it is important to give consideration to the sustainable environment for food production while simultaneo...

Land use change is one of the fundamental influence factors of human life and well-being. The land use change due to the unprecedented urbanization in China not only causes an increase of resource consumption and threatens food security, but also affects the people’s living standard which deserves our attention. This study aims to reveal the impacts of land use change on residents’ living stand...

Traditional energy analysis in Building Information Modeling (BIM) only accounts for the requirements of building operations during a portion occupancy phase building’s life cycle and as such is unable to quantify true impact buildings on environment. Specifically, typical BIM does not account associated with resource formation, recycling, demolition. Therefore, comprehensive method required an...

The present conflict between the people of Israel and the people of Palestine has been going on for the last 125 years. The source of the quarrel has deep historical roots and has been attributed to differences in religious beliefs and customs, the conflict of the dreams and destinies that the two peoples hold for a single land, and to a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance for violent acts, in...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become a standard procedure to investigate the environmental performance of human-dominated products and processes. It is meant to capture the overall impact of a product or service along its lifetime and supply chain, and it is structured in four steps: goal definition and scoping, inventory, impact assessment, and interpretation. Impact assessment is carried ou...

This study investigates the resource consumption of Japanese society since 1979 and its subsequent effects on the economic output of the nation and the environment. In order to quantify resource appropriation and trends in production and consumption, the concept of emergy synthesis is employed. Our results show a significant increase in the total amount of emergy consumed by 66.9% between 1979 ...

The performance of a power generation process is most often evaluated in terms of energy efficiency and emissions. Emissions generated by coal-fired power generation are among the main sources of pollution (CO2, dust and acid gases) in China and other coal-intensive countries worldwide. However, this is only the downstream aspect of a coal plant performance, where focus is most often placed on ...

The urban metabolic process causes impacts on natural capital and human capital, which range from local to global scale. In this study, an emergy-based environmental impact assessment model is designed for the urban metabolic system of Beijing from 1999 to 2006. The model focuses on two main typologies of processes, i.e., production and consumption. The direct and indirect emergy demand was ass...

Colombia’s main water bodies have been seriously polluted due to mismanagement of domestic, agricultural, and industrial wastewater. While the country’s wastewater infrastructure has expanded in the past decades, the selection of the existing treatment technologies has excluded important aspects that could compromise their sustainability. Colombia and similar countries are in great need for ine...

Sustainability Assessment of Greenhouse Cucumber and Tomato Production Agroecosystems Based on Emergy Economic Analysis in Sistan Region