Ecological Energy Accounting for Macao’s Socioeconomic and Ecological Systems

Abstract

Macao is a tourist city with a dense population, but is short on natural resources. During the past 20 years, Macao’s rapid socioeconomic development has depended heavily on the tourism industry. In this chapter, we employed ecological emergy accounting to characterize the urban evolution and development that occurred in Macao from 1983 to 2004.Our research demonstrated that by relying on an attractive gambling industry and an imbalance between imports and exports, Macao has absorbed large amounts of emergy through negative entropy inflows to support not only its survival, but also its booming development. Statistical analysis revealed that the emergy-based indicators in the present study could be divided into three categories (namely, positively and negatively correlated indicators, and non-correlated indicators) according to their correlation with development trends.KeywordsPearl River EstuaryEnvironmental Sustainability IndexEmergy AnalysisEnvironmental Loading RatioEmergy InputThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.