Ecoexergy in the context of environmental sciences

Abstract

Nowadays, it is possible to assert that the causality of environmental problems entails a complex social, economic, cultural and political background; faced with such a situation, it is essential to have an operational science that considers the human factor that is in constant interaction with the environment (socio-ecological systems), while seeking sustainable development. Because of that, it became necessary to join different disciplines in a construct called Environmental Sciences, whose main objective is to study and solve problems related to human-environment interactions.

Endorsing the concept of exergy to an interdisciplinary science implies understanding how society satisfies its needs with the natural resources provided by the various ecosystems and how they sustain demand in the man-environment interaction cycle, starting from the development of structural and functional attributes in a dynamic flow of matter and energy. This can be addressed with the first and second laws of thermodynamics by allowing the use of holistic indicators in the Environmental Sciences; one such indicator is ecoexergy, which describes the state of an ecosystem based on the biomass content and genetic information. Thus, this work presents an outline of the incursion of exergy in the context of environmental sciences, which implies that the ecosystem is an open system whose behavior adheres to the laws of thermodynamics.