Emergy and ecosystem services: A national biogeographical assessment

Ecosystem services are those resources and processes provided by ecosystems that improve human well-being. Emergy is the amount of solar energy embedded in the resources consumed by a system. In this paper we produced a ranking among nations, based on emergy (expressed in seJ/yr) and ecosystem service values (in $/yr). We document a significant correlation between the renewable emergy and ecosystem service values aggregated at the national scale. This suggests that ecosystem services are somehow dependent on energy and natural resource concentration in ecosystems. We also compare the ability of each ecosystem mosaic and economy, within national boundaries, to translate energy and matter inputs into economically valuable goods and services. For ecosystems this is calculated using the ratio between renewable emergy and ecosystem service value. In the case of national economies, it can be estimated using a ratio of the emergy use by the national economy and the GDP of the nation (called Emergy to Money Ratio). In almost all cases the ecosystems in a national territory provide a unit of monetary output using less emergy inputs than the national economy. Further comparison was performed for tropical and equatorial nations, continents, biodiversity hotspots, and biogeographical regions.