Ecological accounting and evaluation of urban economy: Taking Beijing city as the case

Abstract

Urban economy is confronted with increasing biophysical limitations derived from the exhaustion of natural resources and the depletion of environmental capacity, and human cultural diversity has been declining during the fast urbanization. The conventional anthropocentric economics, regarding the natural environment as the ‘exterior’ of human economy, is invalid in the scientific evaluation on the contribution of natural resources and environment as well as human culture when facing the current urban crises. The theory of embodied cosmic exergy, as the latest development of ecological economics and ecological thermodynamics, is introduced in this study to construct an ecological evaluation framework of urban economy. The advantage of embodied cosmic exergy dedicated to ecological economics has been discussed in comparison with other ecological evaluation alternatives. Transformities describing hierarchies and manifesting quality are systematically calculated and tabulated. A new framework of embodied cosmic exergy based on network accounting (EmexNA) is sketched out in this study, taking not only diversity flows but also ecological stocks into consideration. The stock based concept of ‘ecological wealth’ and the flow based concept of ‘ecological cost’ as well as related evaluation indicators are developed based on EmexNA. Taking Beijing city as the case, the network accounting and related ecological evaluation of a practical urban economy are carried out in this study in the light of the basic social, economic and environmental data available from 1990 to 2005 of Beijing. The system construction and the ecological mechanism of the development of Beijing economy are correspondingly illuminated and discussed.