Emergy (with an 'm') synthesis was used to assess the balance between nature and humanity and the equity among forest outcomes of a US Forest Service ecosystem management demonstration project on the Wine Spring Creek watershed, a high-elevation (1600 m), temperate forest located in the southern Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, USA. EM embraces a holistic perspective, accounting for the...

Labor is direct input of human work always accounted for as being a foreground input. Direct labor is accounted for as working hours or years applied and the quality of the worker (unskilled, trained, educated, etc) using Unit Emergy Values for labor based on level of training and education (seJ/person/time). In practice, however, the emergy value of direct labor is computed through the money p...

Four different forest restoration modes (Acacia mangium plantation, mixed-native species plantation, conifer plantation and Eucalyptus plantation) were evaluated using Energy System Theory and the emergy synthesis method. In addition, the eco-exergies of the four forest restoration modes were calculated, and combined with emergy and empower density to explore the restoration and selforganizatio...

Brazil is a country of continental proportions that has significant economic, social and environmental heterogeneities within its territory. The country counts with a high support from renewable resources, a strengthened industrial park, and a large area used for livestock and crop production. The country has 26 states and a Federal District distributed geographically in five regions. In order ...

Wind power is currently the fastest growing renewable energy application in the United States. Many regions, however, such as the state of Florida, do not have high enough average wind speeds for wind power to be economically feasible. Nevertheless, Florida's extensive coastline may present the opportunity for implementing offshore wind technology. Offshore winds are typically stronger due to t...

Despite the abundance of sustainable development research and literature, there is a need to substantiate and quantify the links between human well-being and the environment. The National Environmental Accounting Database (NEAD, Sweeney et al. 2007, these proceedings), which quantifies the resource basis of 134 nations (ca. 2000), was used to provide a uniform set of indicators of resource use,...

Most of current life-cycle approaches show an anthropocentric standpoint for the evaluation of human-dominated activities. However, this perspective is insufficient when it comes to assessing the contribution of natural resources to production processes. In this respect, emergy analysis evaluates human-driven systems from a donor-side perspective, accounting for the environmental effort perform...

The development of the complex and multi-dimensional urban socio-economic system creates impacts on natural capital and human capital, which range from a local to a global scale. An emergy-based multiple spatial scale analysis framework and a rigorous accounting method that can quantify the values of human-made and natural capital losses were proposed in this study. With the intent of comparing...

The study deals with an emergy evaluation of the supply of electricity and heat to a large user, namely a public hospital in Northern Italy. We performed firstly a conventional LCA evaluation, in order to identify and quantify the material and energy flows involved in three cogeneration alternatives for the hospital. The evaluated cogeneration alternatives were: 1) an Internal Combustion Engine...