trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

Figure 2.System diagram of Forestry sector and Pulp & Paper production in FinlandAccording to SUMMA findings the largest share of imported input to support the Finnish forestryis constituted by fossil fuels that amount to about 90% and by machinery that oscillate around 10% inthe investigated period. The total embodied energy investment was 3.70 E+15 J/yr in 1991, steadilyincreasing to 4.70 E+15 J/yr in 2006. The forestry sector in Finland is mainly addressed to the Pulp &Paper production, not to the energy sector, although the calculated EROI in the range 14-16 to 1 alsoindicates a potential energy use of at least a fraction of forest production. The emergy indicators arecalculated with and without accounting for the emergy supporting Labor and Services, that is with andwithout accounting for the emergy indirectly supplied to the system by the outside economy. Accountingfor the emergy associated to labor and services provides an important information about the extent towhich the system is dependent on the performance of the outside larger scale (i.e. the performance of thefuel industry, the machinery industry, as well as the global dynamics of the life support system topopulation). In the investigated years, the larger scale of the economy indirectly supported the forestrysector by supplying about 30% of total emergy needed for the sector activities.The aggregate environmental Emergy Sustainability Index (ESI= EYR/ELR) calculated with andwithout labor and services is also more or less stable, but values indicate that the strong dependence ofEYR from outside investments (30%) as well as the strong nonrenewability of the system itself (68%)place a significant uncertainty on the overall sustainability of the whole sector. A suitable policy strategyshould therefore be the advice of not increasing further the exploitation of Finnish forests, with specialfocus on trying to avoid forestry for energy. Such a finding, although alarming, is a perfect proof of theneed for a multi-method assessment, in order to be able to stress different findings from differentmethods and reach an informed management decision. Moreover, since several of the calculatedindicators are composite indicators, a further disaggregation of their components would be highlyilluminating about the driving forces of the investigated trends. Results show that the forestry sector isstable, but shows alarming signs of unsustainability if more extensively exploited.Several main MuSIASEM application findings are presented in figures 3-7.89