Kyrke Gaudreau

Illustrating integrated sustainability and resilience based assessments: a small-scale biodiesel project in Barbados.

Assessments today need to help reverse trends towards deeper unsustainability and address the unavoidable interconnections, feedbacks and uncertainties that typify complex socio-ecological systems at all scales. To illustrate one promising approach, this paper describes a modest effort to integrate understandings from Gibson et als approach to sustainability assessment with the Resilience Alliances applications of complex systems thinking into a suite of systems and sustainability based criteria. The integrated sustainability-resilience criteria were used to assess an existing small-scale biodiesel operation on Barbados that involves waste management, public health, transportation, energy security and community involvement considerations. The assessment revealed that the main benefit of this biodiesel project is in social learning rather than enhancing energy security and waste management, and the best ways of enhancing the project lie in larger scale policy initiatives. The findings suggest that the use of a sustainability-resilience approach can contribute insights unlikely to emerge from more narrowly focused assessments.

Resource Accounting and Waste Impact: Limitations of Exergy as a Sustainability Tool

Exergy is a thermodynamic concept that has been widely promoted for assessing and improving sustainability, notably in the characterization of resources and wastes. Despite having notable benefits, exergy is often misused by authors who tend to apply it as an intrinsic characteristic of an object (i.e., as a static thermodynamic property). Using both theoretical and empirical evidence the authors introduce the challenges involved with applying exergy as an intrinsic characteristic matter with particular focus on resource value and waste impact. These challenges lead to an in-depth discussion of current major reference environment formulations and reveals that the properties of exergy reference environments are not reconcilable with the properties of the natural environment. The authors conclude by arguing that exergy practitioners should abandon attempts to formulate standard comprehensive reference environments and return to process dependent reference environments that exergy was originally based upon. In this regard, the authors are proposing that exergy be seen as a context- or environment-dependent decision-making tool and not as an intrinsic characteristic of matter.Copyright