Emergy Synthesis: Ecosystem services valuation with thermodynamic basis

Abstract

Emergy Synthesis: Ecosystem services valuation with thermodynamic basis.

A debate on the ecosystem services’ role in socialeconomic systems has started due to the environmental global change. On one hand, neo-classical mainstream Economics attempts to reduce environmental dimension to a monetary approach in the Environmental Economics; on the other hand, Ecological Economics, tries to include physical and social criteria in Economics, within a multi-criteria approach. Emergy Synthesis is included within the latter approach as an ecosystem valuation method with thermodynamic basis, which is devoted to valuate some physical aspects of the economic process in support to policy decision making. The main concept of the method is energy memory or emergy, a measure - in common units of embodied solar energy - of the matter, energy, money, and information flows which contribute to a specific service, functioning or product. With this aim, energy quality, energy hierarchy, and transformity concepts are developed, within the framework of the maximum empower principle, used to choose among different system configurations, in accordance with socio-political criteria.