Abstract
Howard Odum defined sustainability as preserving a system’s ability to meet both human and environmental needs. Thus, sustainability is a process of adapting to the oscillations that occur in natural capital, recognizing that such unstable states are general patterns in nature. For a limited ecosystem, such as that of a small city, emergy fluctuations are more frequent and potentially more severe than they would be in larger systems with greater buffering capacity.
We used emergy accounting to investigate and characterize the evolution and development of Macao from 1983 to 2003 as a result of land reclamation from the sea. By simulating the emergy trends using the STELLA software, we try to predict the consequences of Macao’s development in the coming 20 years. During our simulation period, the emergy used by Macao is predicted to increase with increasing urban development and population growth, and the area occupied by Macao will expand as the city continues to recover more land from the sea and accumulate emergy storage.
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Lei, K., Zhou, S., Wang, Z. (2014). Emergy Synthesis and Simulation for Macao. In: Ecological Emergy Accounting for a Limited System: General Principles and a Case Study of Macao. Springer Environmental Science and Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45170-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-45170-6_3
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