Valuing the Natural Capital of Sea Areas Based on Emergy Analysis

Abstract

Marine natural capital is an important component of natural capital yields goods and service flows benefiting the human being. The emergy analysis method allows one to account for mass, energy and money flows in an ecosystem, providing technical support for assessing its broader value regarding our economic dependence. Thus, we used this method to evaluate the natural capital of the Zhoushan archipelago sea area from 2011 to 2016 and proposed a formula to estimate the marine organism’s transformity. The average total emergy of our study area was 6.93 × 1022 sej and emdollar was about 9.20 billion yuan, which is equivalent to 9.3% of the average regional GDP of 98.5 billion during the same period. The Zhoushan archipelago sea area has high emergy density (ED) and low emergy self-sufficiency ratio (ESR), which shows low input–output efficiency for local use. In addition, the high purchased emergy (PR), high emergy exchange ratio (EER) and low renewable resources emergy ratio (%R) imply an increasing dependence on the outside social and economic inputs. Overall, Zhoushan sea area was in an early but steady state of development. The results can serve as a benchmark for policy making and implementation to achieve local sustainable development. As a tool for emergy-based sea area capital assessment, the model is of great significance for quantifying the ecosystem service value and accounting for marine/land natural capital value.