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13 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables, 3 appendixes, supplementary data https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2020.110105, This paper reviews different approaches to modelling the energy transition towards a zero carbon economy. It identifies a number of limitations in current approaches such as a lack of consideration of out-of-equilibrium situations (like an energy transition) and non-linear feedbacks. To tackle those issues, the new open source integrated assessment model pymedeas is introduced, which allows the exploration of the design and planning of appropriate strategies and policies for decarbonizing the energy sector at World and EU level. The main novelty of the new open-source model is that it addresses the energy transition by considering biophysical limits, availability of raw materials, and climate change impacts. This paper showcases the model capabilities through several simulation experiments to explore alternative pathways for the renewable transition. In the selected scenarios of this work, future shortage of fossil fuels is found to be the most influential factor of the simulations system evolution. Changes in efficiency and climate change damages are also important determinants influencing model outcomes, This work was supported by the European Union through the funding of the MEDEAS project under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [grant agreement No 69128], With the funding support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S), of the Spanish Research Agency (AEI)

Supporting small farmer livelihoods in fragile, biodiverse regions, such as tropical forests, is a priority for many development agencies and national governments. These regions tend to be characterized by recent human settlements, increasing populations and infrastructure development, as well as competitive land use activities, which exert pressure on fragile ecosystems. Improvement in livelihood strategies often focuses on increasing yields by improving productivity, but without taking into account alternative methods, such as better agricultural practices and their dependence on agrochemical inputs, changing land use through crop substitution, or improving product commercialization. In this research, we use household types, defined according to different land use patterns, in the Northern Amazon region of Ecuador to explore the limitations of, and identify future options for, improving livelihood strategies based on small-scale coffee and cocoa production. The results of the different types are discussed in order to highlight the methods' utility and identify benefits in terms of environmental and social objectives versus economic profitability. Lessons are drawn that could be useful in applications of public policy aimed at the betterment of small coffee grower and cocoa farmer livelihood strategies, which involve thousands of families in the Amazon region of Ecuador, without compromising the environment.

The focus when analyzing the environmental requirements and impacts of the economic system is usually placed on production activities. But all production is associated with final consumption, and recently many studies have also been dedicated to final consumption. This article comprehensively reviews the biophysical assessment of households from the point of view of materials and energy required and emissions and wastes resulting from household consumption patterns. Although the aggregation bias and methodological variability make comparisons difficult, some patterns can be recognized. Results show that for many Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and a few developing countries, household metabolism has been mainly assessed from the energetic perspective, stressing household responsibility for emissions of greenhouse effect gases and climate change. Few studies deal with other emissions and wastes. There is a lack of information about material requirements, too. Environmental input-output (I-O) analysis and life cycle assessment are the methods usually employed, together with the use of economic, environmental, and expenditure information. Information about direct inputs and outputs is complemented with data on the environmental requirements associated with the consumption of goods and services. Multiregional I-O techniques have been used to capture upstream requirements in an attempt to avoid errors owing to truncation and domestic technology assumptions. Housing, food, and mobility are the most important consumption categories, but the shares of these categories in the requirements are different according to environmental, socioeconomic, and demographic factors. Finally, challenges for further research are discussed based on the need for new methodological developments, as well as the potential of the metabolic narrative to elaborate information relevant to sustainable consumption policies

article i nfo This paper reviews the historic development of the conceptualization of ecosystem services and examines critical landmarks in economic theory and practice with regard to the incorporation of ecosystem services into markets and payment schemes. The review presented here suggests that the trend towards monetization and commodification of ecosystem services is partly the result of a slow move from the original economic conception of nature's benefits as use values in Classical economics to their conceptualization in terms of exchange values in Neoclassical economics. The theory and practice of current ecosystem services science are examined inthelight ofthis historicaldevelopment.From thisreview,we conclude thatthefocus onmonetary valuation and payment schemes has contributed to attract political support for conservation, but also to commodify a growing number of ecosystem services and to reproduce the Neoclassical economics paradigm and the market logic to tackle environmental problems.

Although human presence is one of the main characteristics of the Mediterranean identity since ancient times, a false dialectic between conservation and social-economic development has emerged in recent decades. On the one hand, an economic growth policy is taken as the paradigm of social-economic development; on the other hand, there is a multi-scale conservation policy, in which natural protected areas, as patches of preserved nature, are used as one of the main tools to deal with the challenge of sustainability. The Mediterranean Basin is the habitat of many unique species and one of the 25 main biodiversity hotspots in the world, and as a consequence a strong conservation policy has been used to protect environmental values. At the same time, Mediterranean countries are deeply involved in promoting strong economic growth policies, which are not always compatible with environmental ones. In this paper, Spain has been studied as one model of this situation. Due to political reasons, Spanish economic growth and conservationist policies were pursued together during the last 20 years. As a result, Spain owns one of the largest networks of natural protected areas in Western Europe, and at the same time it has experienced one of the strongest periods of economic growths in the European and Mediterranean context during the 1980s and 1990s. An historical series of resource use in five annual periods in the last 20 years of conservation policy, and the effects on the preservation of natural capital have been investigated by means of the eMergy (spelled with an 'm') synthesis approach, which was used to characterize the flow of environmental services supplied by ecosystems, but not in monetary terms. This study shows that Spain is becoming less self-sufficient and more inefficient in resource use, comprehensively measured in eMergy terms. A large part of Spain's economy depends on imported goods and services, and most economic activities are based on tourist services and associated construction, which promotes intensification in the urban use of the territory and more intense environmental impacts and resource use intensification of those countries supplying the raw materials. The consequence is a decoupling of the Spanish economy from local environmental services and the increase of Ecological footprint of Spain, measured by means of eMergy-based indicators. In spite of the increase in number, area and associated budget of the natural protected areas and other conservation measures, the general sustainability of the nation is decreasing.

This paper explores potential contributions of regional material flow accounting to the characterization of environmental pressures. With this aim, patterns of material extraction, trade, consumption, and productivity for the Spanish regions were studied within the 1996-2010 period. The main methodological variation as compared to whole-country based approaches is the inclusion of interregional trade, which can be separately assessed from the international exchanges. Each region was additionally profiled regarding its commercial exchanges with the rest of the regions and the rest of the world and the related environmental pressures. Given its magnitude, interregional trade is a significant source of environmental pressure. Most of the exchanges occur across regions and different extractive and trading patterns also arise at this scale. These differences are particularly great for construction minerals, which in Spain represent the largest share of extracted and consumed materials but do not cover long distances, so their impact is visible mainly at the regional level. During the housing bubble, economic growth did not improve material productivity. © 2015 American Chemical Society

Land-use change is a major driver behind the loss of ecosystem services. We assessed changes in ecosystem services from land-use conversions during the period 1918–2006 in the Donana marshland and estuary in southwestern Spain, one of the largest European wetlands. We contrasted those results with social perceptions of ecosystem services trends using two techniques (expert judgment by a multidisciplinary scientific panel and semi-structured interviews of locals and visitors). The results show that by 2006, (1) 70.5% of the natural or semi-natural land covers had been converted to intensive agriculture and other mono-functional uses, hampering the performance of regulating services and (2) 31% of the wetland area had been strictly protected, affecting cultural and provisioning services. Our results show that land-use changes have led to a polarized territorial matrix exhibiting fundamental trade-offs in ecosystem service supply, where provisioning services produced for exportation and sale in the market, such as cash crops and fiber, have been enhanced at the expense of regulating services, such as hydrological regulation, flood buffering, and habitats for species and specific cultural and provisioning services used traditionally by the locals.

The conceptualization of ecosystems as natural capital that provides services to society, to some extent emerges as a strategic or pragmatic attempt to put in value the role that nature plays in human well-being. Several classifications of the benefits that society receives from ecosystems have been developed in the scientific literature, both in terms of services and in terms of functions or using both concepts with different connotations (King, 1966; Daily, 1997; Costanza et al., 1997; De Groot et al., 2002; Douguet & O’Connor, 2003; Naveh, 2004). These classifications have also been used at international projects such as the CRITINC project (Van der Perk & De Groot, 2000), the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, 2003), and the initiative The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Kumar (ed.), 2010). Assessing ecosystem services involves, for analytical purposes, the translation of complex and interlinked ecological structures and processes into a limited number of ecosystem functions that in turn provide diverse services for humans at different scales (De Groot, 1992, 2006; De Groot et al., 2002). The main difference between ecosystem functions and ecosystem services is related to the direct enjoyment, consumption or use by humans. Sometimes ecosystems generate ecosystem functions that are neither demanded nor valuated by humans (e.g. remote inhabited and unexploited ecosystems) and thus do not strictly involve the supply of ecosystem services except a few global scale services such as carbon sequestration or biodiversity conservation. In this context, ecosystem functions refer to potential services, or to the ecosystems capacity to provide services, while the concept of ecosystem services entails that these have current value for society (Gomez-Baggethun & de Groot, 2010). This research draws on the conceptual framework of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), which distinguishes four different categories of ecosystem services: life-support, regulating, cultural and provisioning services (MA, 2003). Nevertheless, the delineation between the categories of regulating and life-support services is often ambiguous (MA, 2003

The monetary valuation of ecosystem services has proved to be a powerful tool for influencing management decisions, as it can be used to quantify the relative importance of various ecosystem functions. However, these valuation methods are rarely implemented with adequate care; in particular, they do not consider spatial and temporal variations in the services offered and demanded. This paper examines the effect of heterogeneity on the valuation of cultural services offered by the Doñana natural protected area in Spain. We apply the zonal travel cost method at various spatial scales, and the individual travel cost method at various temporal scales. We conclude that economic valuation techniques must account for spatial and temporal heterogeneity if they are to provide accurate and realistic information.

This paper proposes an approach to environmental accounting useful for studying the feasibility of socio-economic systems in relation to the external constraints posed by ecological compatibility. The approach is based on a multi-scale analysis of the metabolic pattern of ecosystems and societies and it provides an integrated characterization of the resulting interaction. The text starts with a theoretical part explaining (i) the implicit epistemological revolution implied by the notion of ecosystem metabolism and the fund-flow model developed by Georgescu-Roegen applied to environmental accounting, and (ii) the potentials of this approach to create indicators to assess ecological integrity and environmental impacts. This revolution also makes it possible to carry out a multi-scale integrated assessment of ecosystem and societal metabolisms at the territorial level. In the second part, two applications of this approach using an indicator of the negentropic cost show the possibility to characterize in quantitative and qualitative terms degrees of alteration (crop cultivation, tree plantations)for different biomes (tropical and boreal forests). Also, a case study for land use scenarios has been included. The proposed approach represents an integrated multi-scale tool for the analysis of nature conservation scenarios and strategies., Comment: 29 pages including 6 figures