Grantham Scholar Ling Min Tan is first author of a new paper about urban metabolism. The paper is An ecological-thermodynamic approach to urban metabolism: Measuring resource utilization with open system network effectiveness analysis.
The paper appears in a special issue of Applied Energy: Advanced approaches and applications of energy footprints to promote global sustainability.
What is urban metabolism? If you want to find out more about this fascinating concept, then you can read this interview with Ling Min Tan. She explains how it can help make cities more sustainable. Plus Ling Min tells us how growing up in Malaysia with parents who believed in wasting nothing inspired her work.
This paper presents a novel urban sustainability assessment method. This method is open system network effectiveness analysis (OSNEA). OSNEA investigates resource utilization in cities.
OSNEA evaluates the ability of the system to extract maximum work done from resources available in cities and reduces the need for extracting new resources.
Importantly, this paper highlights the implications of cities organized as open systems when more and more resources are being imported into the system. Further, it encourages effective operations to maximize the use of limited resources.
Overall, the paper aims to help tackle the global resource problem. Specifically through the better use of existing resources available for sustainable development on a planet with finite carrying capacity.
If you want to read this paper then you can find it for Open Access here