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Hi, welcome back to the second session on the class providing a general framework

for the characterization of the metabolic pattern of social ecological systems.

In this session, we are illustrating the concept of the Bio-Economic Pressure.

That is something which is associated with the level of development of a society.

To introduce the idea, the basic idea, we can use the metaphor of the cheese slicer

that's been proposed by when in relation to the energy return on investment or

the importance of any high quality energy sources.

This idea is this one, that this is a society metabolizing energy,

and this energy is used for different activities.

One part of the activity goes in exploiting primary

resources to make energy carriers.

One part goes in infrastructure and maintenance,

one part goes in the production of the goods.

And services, one, and other part goes directly in the economy, so

this is the part goes in the economy, and

is the part that goes directly in the household sector.

One part is just for the maintenance of humans, and

the other part goes in discretionary activity.

The point of was that if

you have high equality of resources, the amount of energy that you have to spend

to extract energy is marginal compared with the total.

If you have low quality of resources, of course,

you have to invest more and more just in extracting energy.

And this will reduce the amount of energy that can be consumed at the end,

especially in the outsource sector and the service sector.

So if you're a member, we already went into this concept of the dynamic budget.

So primary sources are used to make energy, water, and nutrient carriers.

The energy, water, and agriculture sector, primary sectors, are used

to generate these resources and supply these resources to the rest of society.

If you remember,

there is this catabolic part is using available gradients to provide.

We use it for material, for the internal construction and reproduction of.

And this anabolic part is in fact reproducing human, institution,

and technology and infrastructures.

Okay, if we are getting this idea of the cheese slicer, and

we use it with the grammars and the categorization of the flows that we

illustrate so far, we could have this representation,

which will have natural resources and primary energy sources on the bottom.

And then agricultural and geomining is using this primary energy sources and

other resources to provide internal inputs for the rest of the society.

The paid work sector, either in meeting and

manufacturing produced power capacity infrastructure and in the service and

government reproducing institution and take care of the humans.

In the household sector, reproduce the human with chores and overhead

in terms of sleeping and the other activities needed to reproduce the humans.

And finally, you have one part of discretionary activity of humans.

Getting back to what we discussed in the previous session,

we can see that the bio-economic

pressure, the tendency of a society to invest

as much as possible of the internal input, internal fund and

flows in the reproduction of institution and the reproduction of humans.

So this has to do with the desirability-viability.

Whereas the hypercyclic part is the part that is generating and

is consuming resources but also generating the sources for the society and

is generating more resources as it's using this device called hypercycle can be

defined as having a certain strength of the exosomatic hypercycle.

It would be the surplus that they can give to the dissipative parts

in relation to how much they are requiring.

So of course, the bio-economic pressure and the strength of the exosomatic

hypercycle are linked, because if we increase these, we increase these.

If we decrease these, we have to decrease as well this one.

So let's visualize the same situation in a different way.

We have favourable conditions.

This is where gradients given by nature outside of our human control

are available, then you have a mix of primary energy sources,

and then the energy mining general a mix of energy carriers.

And these, in the primary sector, these energy carrier are used to supply material

and energy, and in the agriculture to supply food and other biomass.

Then this energy mix is used in the secondary sector to supply

power capacity, infrastructure, and all the good.

So then these, the primary and secondary sector are the one contributing

to the biophysical metabolic flows into the system.

Then we go to the tertiary sector that is reproducing institution.

And then here, you get government, military, health care,

education, transport, all the other activity of the service sector.

And what is left go in final consumption where we are reproducing human being.

What is the bio-economic pressure?

Bio-economic pressure is the more is society is reached,

the larger must be the fraction of flow going here and here.

And this of course depend on the ability of producing a lot of surplus

in the primary sector.

If the primary sector would consume much more than they are consuming now,

this will reduce the amount of resources available for

the delivery part, and these will destabilize the society.

So if you're looking at, for instance, Spain,

we already saw this a few times, we can go Quick internet,

we have the total Spain as the total endowments of

human activity, a total consumption of electricity, heat, fuels, and

the total production of gross value added.

These can be divided by the different sectors, and

when we are looking at the same data in terms of percentage of the total,

we discover that basically, the quantity going in the primary Sector

is small compared with the quantity going in the rest of the society.

We can look it in the next slide.

You can see that basically, 99% of the human activity goes

in the rest of society, and 90% of it, 95% of fuel,

78% of electricity, and 87% of the gross value added.

So basically, we can say that the more develop the society,

the more we are moving at into a way from the primary sector,

the flows of energy, the fund of human activity.

And as a result, we are generating more gross value added.

Looking at this effects in Europe,

this is the values for European 27+ Norway.

And you can see basically, there was human activity, electricity, heat,

fuel, gross value added.

This part here, the blue, different grades of blue are the bio-economic pressure.

And the grey one is what is consumed in the primary sector that

the smaller is this, the higher is the bio-economic pressure.

What is important in this study, this is the study that we did in a European

project, can be found in this deliverable, is that in Spain,

more or less this situation is the same.

If we go in Bulgaria, the situation is the same.

If we go in Finland, the situation is the same.

So we are using, we are looking at European countries that are pretty

different, Bulgaria, Finland, Spain, but basically, the story doesn't change.

Rich country have an enormous bio-economic pressure in the sense

they require to overrate with almost the amount of humanity,

the energy in there, household sector, service and

government, manufacturing and construction.

These can be checked in terms of viability.

Do you remember the Sudoku effect?

So we could use this Sudoku effect to check the implication of

the metabolic change, of changes in the metabolic pattern.

Again, looking at the allocation of energy, human activity,

and power capacity, these is a different data for 2007.

We have, with the Soduko effect,do you remember this?

The sum of this, the different compartment of the society must be equal to

the total for human activity and for power capacity.

And then we have, that in horizontal terms,

if we divide the amount of energy per amount of hour,

we will get an exosomatic metabolic rate benchmark, megajoule per hour.

This is total energy, total power, and this would be the joule per hour.

What is the point? With the sudoku horizontal relation,

define benchmark.

So if a society has 18 megajoule per hour as average, it's a rich society.

If you would have two megajoule per hour, it would be a very poor society.

In the same way, we can look at how much intensity of use of our capacity,

and that is how much megajoule are used per kilowatt hour.

This is an indicator that is related to utilization factor.

You see in the household sector, the utilization factor is very low.

We keep our car parked to 97% at a time.

So in relation to the amount of power that we have, we didn't use much, and so on.

What is important here?

You can see that the benchmark are very different for

different type of sector or compartments.

So we already saw this is one of the first lessons.

So but what is important here,

that looking at the relation between one specific compartment and a whole,

we can see for instance that in the household sector, it is relevant because

it is using an enormous amount of human activity.

And this really depend on the demographic structure.

So you can see that depending on all the demographic structure change, you could

have a situation which in ageing society, we have less and less work available.

So we already saw this in China, you can have 1 hour of work out of 5,

whereas in Italy, you have 1 hour of work out of 13.

What is the implication of this?

That according to the Sudoku, that you should react to this

enormous requirement of human activity in the household

sector by capitalizing as much as possible in this sector

in order to be able to reduce the demand of chores.

And this is especially relevant for the women.

Basically, the big change in household metabolism as due

to the fact that basically, women were enabled to get into the workforce.

The same was for agriculture.

If you have a very low amount of hours of labor in agriculture,

as a matter of fact now, they are getting less even.

Then this imply that to produce all the food consumed in a year with 48 hours.

And please be aware that in Spain, they are exporting a lot of food, so for

domestic consumption would be less.

You have to have this type of technology in production,

not this type of technology.

In the same way, if you are doing energy and mining, and

you will have eight hours of work per capita per year.

So eight hours of worker giving all the energy consumed in one year,

you must have these type of machines rather than

using bio-mass brought around by human.

So not only we can look at the viability, but

we can also look at desirability.

As a matter of fact,

the bio-economic pressure is a practical indicator of development.

What happened here?

Basically, we can say that the ratio of the quantity of these two,

of the sum of the household sector and service and

government over the total, the higher is this ratio,

the higher is the economic development of the society.

It would be for the energy, for human activity, for power capacity.

So we did two studies, but I'm presenting only the second one here.

Over 82 countries, over the distance of 27 years,

this is in the book published on The Metabolic Pattern of Society.

And you can really see that if you are looking at the 80 countries

to a point in time, 1980 on the left and

2007 on the right, for instance, we're looking here at infant mortality.

Either we are using the bio-economic pressure, or here,

within the GDP per capita, you get exactly the same description

as an indicator in the comparison of another country.

For life expectancy, it would be exactly the same.

You see that there is a plateau at a certain point,

and then it could be the GDP from agriculture and so on.

We did a long study on this human development index and so on.

So what is the conclusion here?

That with economic development,

we are readjusting the profile of investments of human activity, energy and

power capacity across the various functional elements of the society.

In particular, economic growth implies a mass move away from the primary

sector of the fund and flow elements or labor, energy, and capital.

Initially, these flows goes into the manufacturing and

construction sector before reaching the plateau.

And later on, when the industrialization is

sufficient to guarantee a decent supply of goods and

power capacity infrastructure, then additional

fluid funds are used to boost the ability of consuming more.

So it gets more and more into the service sector and the household sector.

Studying viability and desirability using the concept of Bio-Economic Pressure

Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems: the Nexus between Water, Energy and Food

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