What Is Emergy For?

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What Is Emergy For?

This is a very practical and straightforward question, and it deserves a straightforward answer. Odum had this to say:

Whereas environmental issues are now typically characterized by adversarial decision making, rancor, and confusion, these conflicts may not be necessary in the future. A science-based evaluation system is now available to represent both the environmental values and the economic values with a common measure. Emergy, spelled with an “m,” measures both the work of nature and that of humans in generating products and services. By selecting choices that maximize emergy production and use, policies and judgements can favor those environmental alternatives that maximize real wealth, the whole economy, and the public benefit. – HT Odum, Environmental Accounting, 1996, p.1

If you have asked, or been asked, ‘What is emergy for?’, here is a summary of applications of this theory and method:

1. Measuring the sustainability of production processes

Emergy evaluation of any production process leads to emergy indices for describing and quantifying the sustainability of that human activity in absolute terms and in comparison with other human activities.

2. Evaluating environmental resources

Real wealth starts with environmental resources. The “free” inputs from nature are the starting point for building human society – the sun, wind, rain, water sources, and soil all contribute to natural and human-modified systems. When evaluated with emergy, all contributions to value can be quantified.

The products of forestry, agriculture, fisheries, aquaculture, and mining support our economies. Emergy provides tools for their evaluation that include the work of nature contributing to their value.

3. Mitigation

As part of environmental management and development, people may want to swap one ecosystem area for another and need a quantitative basis for stating how much of one type of environment is equivalent to another in terms of public value.

4. Mining and minerals

Evaluating the positive contributions of minerals to society along with the negative effects of the processes of extracting them is needed. For, example, minerals such as phosphorus are valuable for farming, while strip-mining loses environmental value. A full evaluation is possible with emergy.

5. Impact assessment

Evaluating the negative impacts of human production processes or accidents is needed. The complete effects of waste products and industrial spills need to be quantified.

6. Risk assessment

Knowledge of potential impacts to ecosystems and society can be used to assess the risks of development.

7. Evaluating fuels and electricity

Fuels and electricity drive the rest of the economy. Comparisons should be made that include the total costs of production, with indices that relate input to output. Fossil fuels have high emergy yield ratios that most ‘renewable’ energy resources cannot match. The peaking supplies of fossil fuels will have a dramatic effect on the systems they support, and thus accurate evaluations are imperative.

8. Evaluating development alternatives

Societies consider options for economic development. They need accurate measures for choosing between alternatives. Development choices are sensitive to many factors, including its ecosystem context and position in spatial hierarchy.

9. Emergy of states and nations

Nations and states interact with each other in the flows of trade in goods and services. The value of those goods and services should be put on an emergy basis to advise public policy. The total emergy budget of any region can be calculated and compared to the money flow within the region to produce a ratio – the emergy/money ratio. When money is used to trade between regions, the emergy values can be compared to judge the fairness of the trade. Where trade is unfair, policies can be implemented to make amends. These evaluations also produce understanding of global relationships in the present and past.

National and regional emergy indices provide many tools for evaluating the sustainability of human activities.

10. Evaluating information and human service

Information is a product of all living systems, ranging from the genetic information in DNA to the cultural information of societies. Information maintains time-tested energy pathways, which dramatically enhance self-organization for maximum empower. Evaluating the contributions of information to the production and maintenance of ecosystems is often omitted or haphazardly achieved. Emergy can be used to evaluate information of all types, including DNA, cultural knowledge, and the services of people in their contributions to any process.

11. Creating understanding!

Emergy studies incorporate the entirety of Odum's lifework. The maximum empower principle and hierarchy theory are the foundations. His long interest in biogeochemical cycles is also evident. His experience as a meteorologist is there. His sociological knowledge from his father is there. His knowledge as a computer simulation pioneer is there. His knowledge of Earth systems, of coral reef ecosystems, of tropical rainforests, of freshwater springs, of wetlands, they are all part of his theorizing the emergy approach to ecological economics.

Perhaps the greatest value of systems thinking, upon which the emergy concept is based, is its ability to create understanding. By moving up and down scales, using the 'macroscope' to view people and nature, we can see and comprehend both the forest and the trees. In a world in which reductionist science is the norm, emergy can give us the big view, it has the capacity to answer the meaningful questions of general interest to us all.