Resumen de The pattern of socio-ecological systems: a focus on energy, human activity, value added and material products /
This thesis is about the development of analytical tools within an innovative theoretical framework, with the goal of generating more useful quantitative data in relation to the analysis of sustainability. In particular, the methodological approach explored here wants to integrate quantitative information referring to different dimensions of analysis (economic, demographic, social, biophysical and environmental), different scales (macro-regional, regional and national) and different levels of analysis (whole economy, economic sectors and subsectors).
As discussed in detail in Chapter 3, it is becoming more and more evident that biophysical analysis has to become more holistic. It has to be capable of contextualizing and giving meaning to the individual quantitative assessments it produces. Aggregate indicators referring to the whole economy or to specific technical coefficients describing individual processes are not coherent with each other and when used in isolation do not provide reliable information about the performance of the economy.
The innovative theoretical framework I used for my exploration is the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM), which allows developing a quantitative relational analysis capable of dealing with multiple scales and dimensions, as required for dealing with sustainability issues. The goal of the method (and of my explorations) has been the identification of the relevant factors that have to be considered in order to study the performance of the metabolic pattern of modern societies.
My research started – Chapter 2 - with a basic application of MuSIASEM’s methods to compare the changes in the performance of the economies of China and India in the period between 1971 and 2010. Adopting the established accounting procedure, this analysis was based on data referring to energy (measured in gross energy requirement), value added and human activity at three levels of analysis: (i) average society; (ii) paid work vs. households, and (iii) the set of economic sectors made up of agriculture, industry and services. This analysis identified relevant factors affecting the metabolic patterns of these two big countries: their demographic structure, the level of capitalization of their different sectors or the different effects that this capitalization generated on the material standard of living in the household sector.
Afterwards, I developed a new protocol of analysis able to keep the accounting of energy forms of different qualities separate. This was required by the unsatisfactory situation with existing biophysical indicators of performance (Chapter 3). The accounting of “energy” was no longer done in Joules of gross energy requirement, but using different categories of “Joules” referring to different energy carriers (electricity, fuels and process heat).
In order to apply the new protocol across different scales, it was applied to a large case study, by considering the metabolic pattern of European countries (EU27 + Norway). Moreover, this analysis was carried out across many levels, arriving to distinguish up to 13 subsectors inside the Manufacturing and Construction sector (Chapter 4).
Finally, the last exploration of the potentialities of the approach was related to an attempt to include material flow accounting, starting with the analysis of the products produced and the level of imports and exports of a subsector of the industrial sector (Chapter 5). The analysis shows that the approach can be effectively used to: (i) identify relevant categories of production processes taking place at lower levels than subsectors, and (ii) characterize the level of openness of the subsectors (the degree of externalization to other socio-ecological systems). This last analysis was carried out for EU22 countries.
