Environmental Accounting
Test Results: “Total Cost Accounting course and Test” located at http://teexcit.tamu.edu/tca / (Total Cost Accounting online course and test).
Bakshi, B.R., Landers, E.F., Singh, S., Merugula, L.A., Mishchenko, O., and Fiskel, J. (2012, November 2). Accounting for ecosystem services in life cycle assessment by Eco-LCA: Advances in methodology and software. Paper to be presented at the Annual Conference of the 11th Global Congress of Process Safety on April 2015 in Austin, Texas.
The authors explain the role of ecosystem goods and services in the support of economic activities, and the relation of the use of ecosystem goods and services to sustainability. The variety of ecosystem goods and services is broad, however, most sustainability methods have not considered their contribution well. Consider that these are all ecosystem goods or services that play a role in sustainability: 1) The provisioning of water, food, and biomass; 2) the regulation of pests and rules to influence flooding and climate; 3) the supporting of biogeochemical cycles and photosynthesis through various practices; and, 4) the encouragement of tourism, spiritual development, and aesthetics.
A model that enables accounting for a number of ecosystem service is presented by the authors. The model uses the United States economy as a basis, but extends the input-output (EEIO) aspect so that it is characterized by environmental components. The modified and extended model permits the economic sectors to be checked according to ecological life cycle assessment, or Eco-LCA. Several different versions of this model are mentioned briefly by the authors. One version is a model that uses thermodynamic methods, which are based on the analysis of emergy and exergy, further enabling the aggregation of a range of ecosystem services. Another model version is a hybrid Eco-LCA that was developed by combining the input-output (IO) model with data from the detailed process.
The narrative describes a work around for addressing the difficulty of quantifying many ecosystems, particularly regulating services. Qualitative EEIO modeling and LCA are used to gather information about the extent to which economical sectors are dependent on the ecosystem service of interest. The approach uses a dependency rating of high, medium, and low, which is transmitted through the IO model in order to generate qualitative information about the dependency of the economic product on the economic service. Fundamentally, the algebra of the EEIO models provides the intermediate flow from the relevant sectors in order for them to be quantified in Eco-LCA. This means that data about the physical products, such as biomass, fish, grains, legumes, and medicinal plants — and even the phosphorous cycle — are included in the Eco-LCA by incorporating the flows into the relevant economic sectors.
Using new Eco-LCA software, the authors have been able to implement these approaches, basically utilizing three types of frameworks for the analyses: 1) Ecosystem services; 2) footprints; and, 3) thermodynamic analysis. Cumulative energy consumption is analyzed with and without ecosystems in the thermodynamic analyses. The authors point out that the ecosystems analysis is analogous to the analysis of energy, in that, the tools use renewability index metrics and thermodynamic return on investment. Using classification systems based on the ecosystem contributions to sustainability, the authors explain that the data can be hierarchically aggregated or presented as multiple, individual units. The footprint methods include univariate indicators, such as carbon, land use, nitrogen, and water.
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