No abstract

Agricultural production operates via the existing relationships between nature and economy. Its sustainable development requires tools that provide a broad vision of the energy flows that intervene in these systems, to support the decision-making process in energy management. To quantify the environmental resources and economic inputs involved, emergy analysis has been used, as well as process modeling, to make a detailed record of the system inputs. The research aim is to propose a multidisciplinary approach that integrates emergy analysis and process modeling in agricultural systems, promoting their sustainable management. This approach was validated in the Los Naranjos coffee farm in Popayán, Colombia, during the years 2018–2020. The results show that the farm achieved its best energy performance and was more sustainable in 2020, producing 1693 kg/ha of green coffee, with the lowest Unit Emergy Value (UEV; 1.12 × 106 seJ/J) and the highest Emergy Sustainability Index (0.24), for the three years analyzed. In addition, natural inputs contribute approximately 27% of the total emergy, and those from the economy contribute 73%. In conclusion, this approach allows a precise and complete analysis of the system’s energy flows, significant energy uses, and energy sources at each production process stage, helping to establish the basis for an energy management system. We consider that the proposed multidisciplinary approach is a tool that would help in the sustainable management of any agricultural system, and its implementation and comparison in various contexts would be important.

Modernization goes along with a significant increase in pollution-related health risks linked to the ever growing economic and technological development. In addition to water-related communicable diseases, there are emerging concerns regarding the burden of disease attributable to the complexity of chemical pollution loads released into the environment. Studies demonstrating an association between chemical exposure and the occurrence of disease are abundant, particularly in occupational settings, although fewer assessments are available for the open environment. Agrochemicals, pharmaceutical compounds, disinfection byproducts, heavy metals, and many other emerging chemicals in very small concentrations, plus the mixture (cocktail effect) of several pollutants have shown ecotoxicological and genotoxic effects among various species in the trophic web of both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, at the apex of which are humans. Despite this evidence, water quality standards focus mostly on communicable diseases risks, and the widely promoted burden of disease approach mainly integrates the effects of gastrointestinal and respiratory infections. Based on previous research and information collected in a tropical Andean watershed at southwestern Colombia, we characterized drivers and hazards of disease and estimated water-related environmental burden of communicable diseases and an approximation to the likely burden of noncommunicable diseases. Estimates of disease burden are analyzed to find out disparities driven by ethnic, gender and socioeconomic status. Results show that profound inequalities persist affecting the most vulnerable populations for preventable communicable diseases. In addition, lack of information and more research continues to make the impacts of noncommunicable diseases, related to chemical pollution from individual substances and their cocktail effect alike, largely invisible. The DALY addition effect and its econometric approach ought to be enriched with historical and critical perspectives to make visible the profound social and health inequalities immersed in the socioecological systems of the global South.