Luca Coscieme

A Thermodynamic Geography: Night-Time Satellite Imagery as a Proxy Measure of Emergy

Night-time satellite imagery enables the measurement, visualization, and mapping of energy consumption in an area. In this paper, an index of the “sum of lights” as observed by night-time satellite imagery within national boundaries is compared with the emergy of the nations. Emergy is a measure of the solar energy equivalent used, directly or indirectly, to support the processes that characterize the economic activity in a country. Emergy has renewable and non-renewable components. Our results show that the non-renewable component of national emergy use is positively correlated with night-time satellite imagery. This relationship can be used to produce emergy density maps which enable the incorporation of spatially explicit representations of emergy in geographic information systems. The region of Abruzzo (Italy) is used to demonstrate this relationship as a spatially disaggregate case.

Accounting for “land-grabbing” from a biocapacity viewpoint

The comparison of the Ecological Footprint and its counterpart (i.e. biocapacity) allow for a classification of the worlds countries as ecological creditors (Ecological Footprint lower than biocapacity) or debtors (Ecological Footprint higher than biocapacity). This classification is a national scale assessment on an annual time scale that provides a view of the ecological assets appropriated by the local population versus the natural ecological endowment of a country. We show that GDP per capita over a certain threshold is related with the worsening of the footprint balance in countries classified as ecological debtors. On the other hand, this correlation is lost when ecological creditor nations are considered. There is evidence that governments and investors from high GDP countries are playing a crucial role in impacting the environment at the global scale which is significantly affecting the geography of sustainability and preventing equal opportunities for development. In particular, international market dynamics and the concentration of economic power facilitate the transfer of biocapacity related to “land grabbing”, i.e. large scale acquisition of agricultural land. This transfer mainly occurs from low to high GDP countries, regardless of the actual need of foreign biocapacity, as expressed by the national footprint balance. A first estimation of the amount of biocapacity involved in this phenomenon is provided in this paper in order to better understand its implications on global sustainability and national and international land use policy.

Dark Times: nighttime satellite imagery as a detector of regional disparity and the geography of conflict

Satellite observations of night-time emitted lights describe a geography of the spatial distribution of resource use. Measurements of nocturnal lights enable the calculation of the total light emitted from each country of the world, and the light emitted per capita. We consider different groups of countries that share a land or maritime border and whose light per capita can be more equally/unequally distributed. A sharp difference in light per capita among neighboring countries reflects marked differences in economic welfare and in the extent of built environments. We demonstrate how this geography of nocturnal lights informs our understanding of the dynamics of conflict at the national and regional scale. We propose an index of regional disparity and test its ability to detect conflict dynamics by relating the index score with the occurrence and intensity of conflicts as classified by the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research’s Conflict Barometer 2012 for the countries of the world. This method can be used to produce a global available temporal sampling of “cold spots” of disparity where conflicts are likely to occur. This will help foresee the identification and monitoring of regions of the world,which are becoming particularly unstable, assisting in the definition and execution of timely and proactive policies.

Biomes, Ecosystem Services And Emergy:Is There A Relationship?

Ecosystems and human systems are interconnected through a complex series of dynamic relations. In particular, natural functions of ecosystems generate flows of services continuously. To represent adequately the importance of ecosystems for human well-being, the concept of Ecosystem Services (ES) was defined. A complete review of methods and values for the assessment of ES from an economic viewpoint was provided by Costanza et al. in 1997. However, in ES valuation (ESV) several values are neglected or not calculated and estimation methods rely on strictly economic and subjective practices. In order to have a physical reference upon which an objective (and complementary) evaluation can be based, we used the concept of emergy. Emergy is a thermodynamic entity based on energy quality and hierarchy. Life on Earth is organized in an ordered series of energy transformations from one type to the next; these types do not have the same ability to do work. Emergy can be defined as the quantity of (solar) energy that is used up directly or indirectly to make a product or a service. An accounting system based on emergy can be implemented to evaluate production processes, ecosystems and nations. In this paper the emergy of different biomes was calculated and translated into money by means of a specific “environmental” emergy-to-money conversion factor given by the ratio of the renewable emergy supporting the entire biosphere (emergy baseline) to the value of the world ES previously proposed. The results show that the new economic value is higher than classical ESV values.

Identification and evaluation of ecosystem services for a regional park: a case study in Italy

This paper analyses the ecosystem services provided by a regional park in the South of Italy. The park, constituted by 12 municipalities, aims at facilitating a smart management of cultural-historic and environmental heritage as well as the optimization in the use of local resources and peculiarities. The ecosystem services actually provided by the park (e.g. CO2 sequestration) or potentially usable (e.g. the production of olive-oil) have been identified. The aim is to highlight the essential importance of the natural capital stock and the services it provides for the local economy and for those who can take benefit from them. Neglecting the ecosystem services’ value in decision making processes entails the loss of several assets – in some cases un-replaceable, such as local biodiversity – which may imply serious consequences for the overall ecosystem and the sustainability of the local economic system.