How can we measure the actual cost of climate action? How can we calculate environmental damage before it occurs? Today, these complex questions can be interpreted thanks to emergy (with an “m”) analysis, a method that promises to offer a more comprehensive and integrated evaluation of the concepts and categories involved in sustainability policies.
An opinion piece published on the online magazine npj Climate Action and written by a group of researchers from the University of Bologna, the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and the University of Salento, with expertise ranging from physics to law, suggests to use emergy analysis to overcome the limitations of the current measurements, which are often based only on financial evaluations.
The idea of emergy, developed by the systems ecologist Howard T. Odum, can be defined as the “memory” of all the energy that was directly or indirectly used to produce a commodity or service. It enables the calculation of the overall “energy cost” of a good or process, and therefore their intrinsic value, by considering everything that nature and society have “invested” to achieve it.
One of the most promising applications of this method is the management of so-called climate litigation, i.e. the legal action pursued against states or other institutions because of their failure in safeguarding the health and fundamental rights of today’s children. Globally, there are already over two thousand requests of this type, and often the court requires an estimate of future damages. This operation can prove difficult with the current legal instruments.
“This approach represents an important connection between hard sciences and law”, explained Silvia Bagni, professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Bologna, and Michele Carducci, of the University of Salento. “Providing a scientific and objective method to measure the ‘intrinsic value of nature’ or the ‘environmental damage’ can represent a revolution in climate law. It means providing judges and institutions with measurable tools, useful to make decisions based not only on short-term economic reasoning, but also on a principle of biophysical responsibility towards the planet and future generations”.
The emergy approach helps to overcome the divisiveness that characterises global challenges are often addressed, as in the case of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whose limitation is linked to a “siloed” approach. By calculating the interconnections between different resource flows, emergy can show the synergies and the compromises, and provide a scientific basis for more integrated and effective policies.
“Emergy analysis enables the calculation of the energy cost required to restore a damaged environmental resource, thus providing an objective measure for quantifying the damage even before its full manifestation”, affirmed Francesco Gonella, physicist at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and lead author of the research. “The idea behind this project originated from our collaboration with the promoters of the legal action against the Italian Government, undertaken because of its failure to address climate change. We realised that a scientific and quantitative approach, based on the laws of thermodynamics governing dissipative systems (applicable to all systems), could provide a real instrument to support the legal action and, more generally, to direct political decision-making towards truly sustainable options”.
