Abstract
The United Nations action plan Agenda 21 has represented a milestone toward Sustainable Development. On its 40th Chapter, it is introduced the requirement to dispose of an accurate and continuous collection of information, essential for decision-making. Besides bridging the data gap and improving the information availability, it is highlighted the need to dispose of sustainable development indicators, in order to assess and monitor the performances of countries toward sustainability. In this paper, we develop an improvement of a new indicator, recently introduced linking environmental anthropic footprint and social and industrial targets. Here, we suggest a link with the Income Index, in order to consider also a condition of people well-being. Our results consists in an improvement of the present approaches to sustainability; indeed, we link the socio-economic considerations, quantified by the Income Index and the Human Development Index, to the engineering approach to optimization, introducing the thermodynamic quantity entropy generation, related to irreversibility. In this way, two different new indicators are introduced, the Thermodynamic Income Index and the Thermodynamic Human Development Index, which quantitatively express a new viewpoint, which goes beyond the dichotomy between socio-economic considerations on one hand and engineering and scientific approach to sustainability on the other one. So, the result leads to a unified tool useful for the designing of new policies and interventions for a sustainable development for the next generations.
Highlights
The use of a continuous increasing amount of energy has been fundamental for the human development
Nowadays, there are main concerns linked to the use of fossil fuels, not last those related to environment and sustainability
The aim of this paper is to develop a new viewpoint based on the fundamentals of sustainable development, considered both from a socio-economic and an engineering viewpoint
Summary
The use of a continuous increasing amount of energy has been fundamental for the human development. A key factor for socio-economic development of societies can be identified in the capability to manage flows of energy and materials (Cleveland et al 1984). During the evolution of human history, specially from the industrial era up to now, our society has begun to need always more power and to deeply depend on fossil fuels. The increase in greenhouse gasses (GHGs) and pollutant emissions on the one hand, and the depletion of fossil fuel resources on the other one, are driving the scientific research to find alternative sources of energy and technologic solutions to burn less fuel and to reduce pollutant emissions. In the last decades, increasing and optimizing energy efficiency has become a highpriority for all engineering areas, specially in relation to sustainability, sustainable development and to the rational use of resources
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