Progress Made on Emergy Evaluation of Estuary Wetland Ecological Economic Systems

Recently, researchers from the Vegetation and Landscape Ecology Research Group of the South China Botanical garden (SCBG), CAS and Atlantic Ecological Division (AED), U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have jointly done an integrated emergy- economics study on Spartina marsh, aquacultural and agricultural land use patterns in estuary areas. The results indicated that the introduction and development of Spartina could improve the ability of estuary ecosystem and landscape on absorbing environmental resources, such as sediment, and will be replaced automatically by national species after land making. Thus, Spartina could be used as pioneer restoration species to speed up land making in estuaries. Emergy and economic evaluations are complementary methods, with emergy analysis shedding more light on environmental support and impacts of the production systems not considered in the market value, and economic analysis focusing on the effects of markets. Directly introducing the global-scale ecosystem service values regional market exchange may make the transactions less advantageous for sustainable development. It was covered up by temporally prosperous economy that the productivity of labor in Chinese agriculture is low and the price for agricultural products is lower than their cost-value if taken environmental contribution into accounting. 

The results of this study have been published in the prestigious journals, Ecological Engineering (two papers), and Journal of Environmental Management recently. They provided a useful contribution on understanding estuary ecological economic systems, and contributed to further integration between emergy and economic analysis.