Energetic analysis of environmental sustainability in the municipality of Palmira (Colombia)

<p>A rising global urban population, increases the demand for natural resources for a certain quality of life. This creates negative impacts on natural ecosystems and the survival of other species. For this reason, it is necessary to measure the state of cities as ecological systems with the pur­pose of prioritizing environmental management, in accordance to sustainable development. To this end, there exist methods of chrematistic eva­luation which exclude the work of nature to pro­vide environmental services that promote envi­ronmental sustainability. This study investigated models that foster environmental accounting and that integrate natural and urban ecosystems. The most original proposal came in the form of emer­getic synthesis, based on thermodynamic con­cepts. The municipality of Palmira was chosen as the study area, known as Techno-ecosystem, and applied a five-phase methodology, based on the emergetic synthesis method. Calculating the rate of emergy production - EYR with 1.46, En­vironmental Load Index - ELR with 3.2 and En­vironmental Sustainability Index - ESI with 0.46. The analysis indicates that environmental sustai­nability and the generation of real wealth is limi­ted by current land use, and can be improved with better use of this resource, through a transversal management process. Furthermore the Techno-ecosystem is subject to the social metabolism of the city of Cali and therefore the demand for im­ported goods and urban land use will increase, reinforcing the need for environmental manage­ment policies , as well as the need to apply to the municipality as Emerging City.