Emergy-based environmental decision making: H.T. Odum´s heritage for appropriate use of resources and environmental services

Economies still rely on a “user value” concept, i.e. value depends on market competition (demand vs offer) as well as work potential (exergy) within technological and economic processes. Howard Odum´s innovative Emergy concept (Odum, 1994) reverses the assessment, by pointing out that the value of a good or commodity relies on the biosphere´s work to generate and make available (“donor value”) resources and services needed within an economic process. Such an assessment is performed by converting all driving flows of available energy (exergy) into flows of solar equivalent energy (Emergy), in so identifying a new value-assessment currency. This value depends on Nature, not on market. According to this reversed framework, an appropriate evaluation of the sustainability of economic and social processes should take into consideration the renewability of resources within biosphere and therefore their future availability. Odum´s “donor-side” approach is a real innovation in policy-making, in that it includes space and time scales assessments for the evaluation of the value of a resource. Developing and comparing emergy-based economic, environmental and social evaluations of human-dominated and natural processes allows a comprehensive evaluation of costs, performance, resilience and sustainability of individual activities, technologies, regulatory decisions, investments, trade, by means of a unique and comparable currency. The Emergy approach could be a tool for policy makers and stakeholders to realize that a new science-based and nature-based pattern is possible and to figure out how this pattern could be. This study aims at showing the applicability of the emergy approach as policy-making tool by means of case studies in different sectors of society and economics.