Sintese dos metodos de pegada ecologica e analise emergetica para diagnostico da sustentabilidade de paises : o Brasil como estudo de caso / Convergence of emergy analysis and ecological footprint methods as a sustainability indicator of countries : Brazil as case study

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

Mankind is facing a challenge without precedents: there is a consensus that Earth?s ecosystems can no longer support today?s levels of economic activities and energy consumption. In order to determine the impact of human activities on the environment and the levels of sustainability, parameters and indicators are necessary. Emergy accounting can evaluate natural capital and ecosystem services. It is able to quantify the work done by nature to produce resources. On the other hand, the Ecological Footprint method has been promoted as a planning tool for sustainability. Despite being one of the most popular methods nowadays, it has received many critiques, especially because of its anthropocentric point-of-view. A modified calculation combining those two methods was proposed by Zhao et al. (2005), but it is not adequate for solving all the problems found in the Ecological Footprint. The aim of this work is to suggest some modifications and include the full concept of emergy into the calculation. The biocapacity was estimated as function of the renewable resources available. Consumption was grouped in categories: cropland, forestry, animal products, and energy resources. All the energy flows were estimated in Joules and then transformed into solar emergy (seJ/year) using the conversion factor ?transformity? (seJ/J). The emergy flows were divided by the ?global emergy density? (seJ/gha) to obtain the ?equivalent global area?. To demonstrate the mechanics of this new method, we applied it to the case of Brazil. The results were that Brazil has an ecological footprint of 41,88 gha/cap and a biocapacity of 64,71 gha/cap. Compared with conventional footprint calculations, the emergy based approach showed more pessimist results for Brazilian ecological reality

ASSUNTO(S)

ecological footprint transformity desenvolvimento sustentavel - brasil pegada ecologica transformidade emergia emergy sustainable development

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