About the Book

Modern society depends on immense flows of energy, materials, and information generated through environmental processes. Conventional economic measures provide little insight into the biophysical foundations that make these flows possible. Emergy: The Coupling of Human and Natural Systems presents a framework for understanding and measuring the contributions of environmental processes to the resources, goods, and services that support human society.

Drawing on more than four decades of research, the book presents the principles, methods, and applications of emergy accounting, from energy quality, transformity, and self-organization to the evaluation of ecosystems, production systems, national economies, and international trade. It incorporates recent advances in emergy science while placing them within the broader framework of systems ecology and biophysical economics. Written for students, researchers, and professionals, the book serves both as an introduction to emergy and as a reference for its application to environmental assessment, resource management, ecological economics, and sustainability.