Urban resource use and environmental performance indicators. An application of decomposition analysis

Multicriteria cost–benefit assessment of tannery production: The need for breakthrough process alternatives beyond conventional technology optimization

“…Emergy has been used in several different case studies, from the assessment of natural (Ulgiati et al, 2011a), agricultural (Agostinho et al, 2008;Bonilla et al, 2010;Giannetti et al, 2011), and industrial systems (Giannetti et al, 2008) to also assessing buildings and cities (Ascione et al, 2009;Conte and Monno, 2012;Mori and Christodoulou, 2012;Zucaro et al, 2014), and information (Abel, 2013). To perform an emergy evaluation, first the system under study must be represented by a detailed energy diagram using the energy system symbols proposed by Odum (1996).…”

Exploring socioeconomic drivers of environmental pressure on the city level: The case study of Chongqing in China

“…In the first stream, research has focused on the accounting of environmental pressures for cities where urban metabolism (Chen and Chen, 2015b;Chen and Wang, 2014;Niza et al, 2009;Wolman, 1965) played an important role. In this research stream environmental pressures are accounted in many aspects by various methods and metrics , such as energy consumption (Chen and Chen, 2015a), greenhouse gas emissions (Tian et al, 2013), pollutant or waste discharge (Zhao et al, 2010), water consumption , emergy (Zucaro et al, 2014), and exergy (Jiang and Chen, 2011). In the second stream, research has focused on exploring the driving forces of environmental pressures in cities.…”

Integrated ecological indicators for sustainable urban ecosystem evaluation and management

“…Two methodologies to define megacity boundaries are compared, showing that further investigation is needed to establish a baseline for comparison of urban metabolism data. Zucaro et al (2014) evaluate the interlinkages and synergies among different resources and performance patterns in the city of Rome by means of decomposition equations in order to identify the major drivers of change in the investigated period as well as future low-resource scenarios. The effects associated with the emissions are evaluated with a special focus on global warming and acidification potential.…”