An application of multi-scale integrated analysis of societal metabolism to environmental economics

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Sustainable society, if any, requires to have an integrated methodological approach that can tackle the issues of various constraints such as supply shortage of energy and mineral resources and carrying capacity. We have been engaged in developing an analytical tool called as "Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal Metabolism" (MSIASM). This tool is an effective tool to explicitly analyze mutual constrains of each compartment of the system in question based on the idea of scaling that has been investigated within theoretical ecology developed by Salthe and Allen. This tool considers not only the distribution of energy among different component of the system, but also the distribution of available human time. We applied the MSIASM approach to the analysis of Chinese economy. First, we made comparison among various types of "energetic labor productivity" between China and OECD countries to investigate the pros and cons of Chinese economy. Then, we made a scenario analysis based on several different assumptions concerning the structural changes in both the population and energy consumption pattern. We have presented our results at the International Conference of European Society of Ecological Economics, held hi Lisbon, Portugal, June 2005. The part of our results is submitted to Ecological Economics for possible publication.