3rd International School on Emergy Accounting
University Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy: May 21-25, 2018
Venice 2018
Another successful school has been completed. Five days of challenging lecture and hands-on problem solving resulted in a stimulating educational experience for all in attendance. The participants were 15 young researchers and PhD students from Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and UK.
Lectures were given by Mark Brown, Sergio Ulgiati and Francesco Gonella; in addition, Amalia Zucaro participated as Instructor Assistant.
Students
In this 3rd edition of the emergy course we had students with a range of expertise in the emergy method: some with basic knowledge of emergy concepts and accounting procedures, some others were more advanced in their understanding. While this is not unusual for these types of short courses, we decided to vary the course organization to not only stress the fundamentals, but to also include time for students to work in groups on several case studies (an agriculture system, an urban system, and an industrial system). Case study teams were composed of at least one advanced student and “beginners” to ensure that groups had similar make up.
Days were organized to include lectures in the morning (about 4 hours) and then working groups in the afternoon. The first day was spent discussing “the systems approach” and “systems thinking”, followed by an afternoon and evening of drawing diagrams of the three case studies. The following day we presented these diagrams and held lengthy discussions regarding syntax, presentation, structure, etc.
Topics covered in lectures included:
- Energy, Exergy and Emergy
- Computing Available Energy of Energy, Materials and Products
- Emergy and Labor
- Emergy and Money
- The Value of Nature, the Nature of Value
- Simulation Modeling
In all, a great deal of emergy theory and practice was covered in word and action. We are grateful to the students for their enthusiasm, energy, and curiosity in making this course another success.
Last Day