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EMERGY ANALYSIS AND ECONOMIC ANALYSIS A COMPARATIVE STUDY
Citation:
Cai, T. EMERGY ANALYSIS AND ECONOMIC ANALYSIS A COMPARATIVE STUDY. Presented at Fujian Agricultural and Forestry University, Fuzhou, China.
Description:
Our mission at USEPA is to protect human health and safeguard the natural environment. We aim to base our environmental regulations and policies on sound scientific and, where appropriate, economic analyses. Although EPA has conducted analysis of the impact of regulations on economic systems for three decades, we have yet to develop an effective methodology for the integrated assessment of impacts on the larger system as a whole, including its social and environmental as well as economic processes. To address this need, USEPA's Atlantic Ecology Division is investigating the linkages between socioeconomic processes driven by preference formation and satisfaction and the environmental processes of available energy exchange and transformation that provide our basic life support. As an initial step in this investigation, emergy valuation will be compared with economic valuation in estimating the costs and benefits of alternative restoration options for acid-impaired stream water. The potential of a synthesis of the principles of system emergetics and economics will be evaluated in light of the results of this comparison. The ultimate criterion for this evaluation will be whether such a synthesis provides realistic and credible information on the relations between economic and environmental processes that can improve our assessments of the impacts of environmental regulations on the integrated system of humanity and nature.