Political Ecology

To evaluate water treatment residue (WTR) as a soil substitute material, its physical properties were investigated and compared with decomposed granite soil (DGS). For comparison purposes, relative gas diffusivity (D/D0), saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ks), water retention curve, porosity and readily available water were measured for both the WTR and the DGS. The measured D/D0, Ks, [...]

The growing interest has prompted the World Bank to launch its own research into how developing nations could benefit from the foreign money. The full report is due any day now but the release has already been delayed several times. A leaked draft suggested that so far, wealthy investors have largely threatened local resources and [...]

The analysis of historical production trends of iron ore and crude steel for the major iron ore and steel producing countries indicates that, incidentally, the major iron ore producing countries are not the major steel producing countries and vice-versa. For example, in 2005, Brazil’s iron ore production was 322 Mt whereas its steel production was [...]

This paper shows how thermodynamics and in particular the exergy analysis can help to assess the degradation degree of earth’s mineral resources. The resources may be physically assessed as its exergy content as well as the exergy required for replacing them from a complete degraded state to the conditions in which they are currently presented [...]

What is the environmentally sustainable approach to immigration and overpopulation? At root, immigration is a population problem: too many people are living in one geographical area and not enough economic production to meet their basic needs there. I decided to crunch some data to see what I could see. I started with a global statistics [...]

The paper argues against the claim made by Emergy Analysts that emergy is an exergy-based procedure. Both Emergy- and Exergy Analysis employ space- and time integrated energy input/output models to quantitatively assess the resource consumption of physical systems: the issue at stake is whether Emergy is embodied energy or embodied exergy. Although the compatibility of [...]

Full UNEP Report Towards sustainable production and use of resources: Assessing Biofuels