LT: Methods Development for Place-Based Industrial Ecology

工业生态学家传统上考察了边界方便会计要求的系统，如河流流域的自然边界或公司、工业或国家市场的经济边界。然而，重要的决策需要跨越由这些边界定义的系统。例如，从经济或环境的角度来看，城市是一个相对开放的系统。本研究的主要目标是发展“基于地点”的工业生态学方法，测试分析开放工业生态系统的策略，并扩大工业生态学的社会科学成分。该项目将通过对新泽西州特伦顿市进行工业生态分析来实现其目标。社会的主要成员将参与界定研究范围，并评估研究的充分性、价值、有效性和合法性。该项目将开发和应用一套分析工具，并在实践中反思其有效性。工具开发将借鉴区域经济学，区域经济学已经开发出诸如位置商、偏移份额分析和区域投入产出分析等技术，以及标准统计和系统分析方法来处理开放的经济系统。因此，这项工作将有强大的社会科学基础，依靠现代微观经济学的见解（特别是交易成本和公共选择范例）。区域经济工具将被调整和扩展到宏观层面的物质和能量流动、中观层面的群落结构、微观层面的个人行为和亚有机体层面的代谢过程的工业生态问题。该项目将为工业生态学领域提供两种方法上的进步：(1)它将引入和测试分析开放系统的工具；(2)它将增加工业生态学的社会科学内容。该项目将使工业生态学研究更紧密地与其主要消费者之一的需求结合起来，从而产生更广泛的影响：基于地点的决策者。这将使该领域与环境政策更加相关。这项资助是根据美国国家科学基金会/朗讯科技公司1998年工业生态研究奖学金计划提供的。

9873587 Andrews Industrial ecologists have traditionally examined systems with boundaries convenient to the accounting requirements, such as the natural boundaries of river basins or the economic boundaries of firms, industries or national markets. However, important decision-making needs cut across systems defined by such boundaries. A city, for example, is a relatively open system when viewed in economic or environmental terms. The primary objectives of this research are to develop methods for "place-based" industrial ecology, to test strategies for analyzing open industrial ecosystems and to expand the social science component of industrial ecology. This project will achieve its objectives by performing an industrial ecological analysis of the city of Trenton, NJ. Leading members of the community will participate in scoping the study and in evaluating its adequacy, value, effectiveness and legitimacy. The project will develop and apply a set of analysis tools and reflect on their efficacy in practice. Tool development will draw on regional economics, that has developed techniques such as location quotients, shift-share analysis and regional input-output analysis, as well as standard statistical and systems-analytical methods to deal with open economic systems. This work will thus have strong roots in social science, relying on the insights of modern microeconomics (especially the transaction cost and public choice paradigms). Regional economic tools will be adapted and extended to industrial ecology questions at the macro-level of materials and energy flows, the meso-level of community structure, the micro-level of individual behaviors and the sub-organism level of metabolic processes. This project will provide methodological advances of two kinds to the field of industrial ecology: (1) it will introduce and test tools for analyzing open systems and (2) it will increase the social science content of industrial ecology. The project will have broader impacts by aligning industrial ecology research more closely with the needs of one of its primary consumers: place-based decision makers. This will make the field more relevant to environmental policy. This grant is made pursuant to the joint NSF/Lucent Technologies Industrial Ecology Research Fellowships Program 1998.