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| 1 |
ID:
125847
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Like cities, many large national parks in the United States often include "urban" visitor and residential areas that mostly demand (rather than produce) energy and key urban materials. The U.S. National Park Service has committed to quantifying and reducing scopes 1 and 2 emissions by 35% and scope 3 emissions by 10% by 2020 for all parks. Current inventories however do not provide the specificity or granularity to evaluate solutions that address fundamental inefficiencies in these inventories. By quantifying and comparing the importance of different inventory sectors as well as upstream and downstream emissions in Yosemite National Park (YNP), this carbon footprint provides a case study and potential template for quantifying future emissions reductions, and for evaluating tradeoffs between them. Results indicate that visitor-related emissions comprise the largest fraction of the Yosemite carbon footprint, and that increases in annual visitation (3.43-3.90 million) coincide with and likely drive interannual increases in the magnitude of Yosemite's extended inventory (126,000-130,000 t CO2e). Given this, it is recommended that "per visitor" efficiency be used as a metric to track progress. In this respect, YNP has annually decreased kilograms of GHG emissions per visitor from 36.58 (2008) to 32.90 (2011). We discuss opportunities for reducing this measure further.
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| 2 |
ID:
124350
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
While emergy analysis (i.e. emergy synthesis, environmental accounting) was developed in the early 1980s by H.T. Odum, building upon his seminal work outlining the energy basis for man and nature, the method is still developing. Some very important aspects of the method, such as the global baseline for renewable emergy and how the emergy yield ratio (EYR), a critical index for implicating the contribution of a process to society, is to be calculated are still under debate in the scientific community. This makes it all the more critical that when an emergy analysis is done all methodology is laid bare and justified. Unfortunately, Zhang et al. (2012. Energy Policy 42, pp 232-238) is deficient in doing so. In the response below I lay out the problems I observed in the paper and propose a revision to their analysis. I should note that no issues were found with the embodied energy portion of the analysis and the inconsistencies with accepted methodology were likely due to an unfamiliarity with the emergy method.
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