Emergy-Based Regional Socio-Economic Metabolism Analysis: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis and Decomposition Analysis

Zilong Zhang,Peter Heck,Xingpeng Chen

doi:10.3390/su6128618

Zilong Zhang, Peter Heck + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su6128618

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Abstract

Integrated analysis on socio-economic metabolism could provide a basis for understanding and optimizing regional sustainability. The paper conducted socio-economic metabolism analysis by means of the emergy accounting method coupled with data envelopment analysis and decomposition analysis techniques to assess the sustainability of Qingyang city and its eight sub-region system, as well as to identify the major driving factors of performance change during 2000–2007, to serve as the basis for future policy scenarios. The results indicate that Qingyang greatly depended on non-renewable emergy flows and feedback (purchased) emergy flows, except the two sub-regions, named Huanxian and Huachi, which highly depended on renewable emergy flow. Zhenyuan, Huanxian and Qingcheng were identified as being relatively emergy efficient, and the other five sub-regions have potential to reduce natural resource inputs and waste output to achieve the goal of efficiency. The results of decomposition analysis show that the economic growth, as well as the increased emergy yield ratio and population not accompanied by a sufficient increase of resource utilization efficiency are the main drivers of the unsustainable economic model in Qingyang and call for polices to promote the efficiency of resource utilization and to optimize natural resource use.

Highlights

The process of economic development driven by industrialization can be seen as a transition from an agrarian to an industrial socio-metabolic regime [1]
The term socio-economic metabolism has been widely applied in different fields, and related studies have been conducted at different levels, such as the household [14,15], industrial [10,16], urban [17,18,19,20] and regional level [21]
The high value of the environment loading ratio (ELR = 3.25) and the low value of the emergy investment ratio (EIR = 0.18) refer to economic growth being greatly devoted to local non-renewable resources, which leads to high environmental pressure

Summary

Introduction

The process of economic development driven by industrialization can be seen as a transition from an agrarian to an industrial socio-metabolic regime [1]. The socio-economic metabolism perspective provides a useful framework for studying the interaction between human and natural systems [13] through quantifying the regional input-output amount and the structures of material and energy flows, the value of local resources and sustainability performance. As for the regional level, related studies refer to quantifying material and the energy metabolic amount and the efficiency of different countries and regions, comparing the sustainability performance for different regional systems [22] by applying material flow analysis (MFA) [23], emergy analysis [20] and other integrated approaches (e.g., the multi-scale integrated analysis of socio-economic metabolism approach, MuSIASEM [21])

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