Sustainability of agro-livestock integration: Implications and results of Emergy evaluation.

This study aims to assess the sustainability of an agroforestry system: i.e. a system obtained by the union of two productions to get at least two by-products from the same productive space.

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 world's countries as ecological creditors (Ecological Footprint lower than biocapacity) or debtors (Ecological Footprint higher than biocapacity).

Environmental and economic evaluation of natural capital appropriation through building construction: practical case study in the Italian context.

This paper focuses on appropriation of natural capital through construction of buildings. The ecological footprint and the Costanza natural capital concepts are applied. The environmental consequences of human settlement are currently of great concern, and a need is felt to reduce the impact of building on the environment.

Environmental sustainability and the integration of different methods for its assessment.

The aim of this paper is to propose a research framework, based on the joint use of three widely used methods: EMergy Evaluation (EME), Ecological Footprint Analysis (EFA) and Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI), that are applied to assess the environmental sustainability of a region. The results of application of these methods to several Italian Provinces enabled us to compare their sustainability, and to test the methods with respect to sustainability requirements at local and global level. The outcomes suggest that the proposed framework provides an organic evaluation of regional systems based on key aspects, such as resources depletion, consumption patterns, waste production and absorption.

Adaptive environmental management of tourism in the Province of Siena, Italy using the ecological footprint.

Adaptive management as applied to tourism policy treats management policies as experiments that probe the responses of the system as human behavior changes. We present a conceptual systems model that incorporates the gap between observed and desired levels of the ecological footprint with respect to biocapacity. Addressing this gap (or 'overshoot') can inform strategies to increase or decrease visitation or its associated consumption in the coming years.

Ecological footprint analysis applied to a sub-national area: the case of the Province of Siena (Italy).

This work is part of a larger project, which aims at investigating the environmental sustainability of the Province of Siena and of its communes, by means of different indicators and methods of analysis. The research presented in this article uses ecological footprint and biocapacity as indicators to monitor the environmental conditions of the area of Siena, thus complementing previous studies carried out using Emergy, greenhouse gases balance and other methods. The calculations have been performed in such a way as to enable a disaggregation of the final results according to the classical categories of ecologically productive land and of consumption, but also according to citizen's and public administration's areas of influence.

Environmental accounting for the lagoon of Venice and the case of fishing.

This paper presents the application of the eMergy evaluation, introduced by H.T. Odum as an efficient methodology of environmental accounting.