Mefa In Mine Ecosystem

In various departments of human activities, mining has the most close relationship with natural resources. Because of the inadequate aware of environmental resources value in the past, mining activities caused not only the reduce of ecosystems adaptability, but also the loss of ecological welfares for future generations. Recently, a consensus seems to be under way to regard sustainability as a problem of the interaction between society and nature. Therefore, the establishment of effective sustainability evaluation indicators for monitoring society-nature interaction is very important during the mineral resources development.Based on the theory of socio-economic metabolism and the framework of MEFA, emergy theroy and methodology was employed in this dissertation. By tracking the material and energy flows in each subsystem, the energetica process and metabolic mechanism of Mine ecosystem on specific life cycle stage were investigated. Yaoqiao Mine of Datun Coal Group and Jisan Mine of Yanzhou Coal Mining Company Ltd. were selected as the Mine ecosystems of empirical research. Both of them are located in the eastern mining area China.With the emergy evaluation of region and the two Mine ecosystems, the quantitative relationship of various emergy flows was analysed from system process, pollutants emission, and the interaction with land use. In units of solar emjoule, the linkages between the social-economic system and the ecological systems were connected on a uniform standard. Then, the problem of difficult to compatible with each indicator among multi-disciplinary evaluation was solved. The dissertation also quantified the contribution of environmental resources and negative impact of mining activities based on emergy evaluation.Through the regional emergy evaluation of Xuzhou, where Yaoqiao Mine located in, the emergy theory and evaluation methods were introduced in details. The values of a series of emergy indicators were used for assessing the dynamic changes of regional development trajectories. Some main emergy indices were provided for Mine ecosystem emergy evaluation and for comparative analysis between mining and other industry in the region.Different types of material and energy flows during Mine ecosystem metabolic process were integrated in summary diagram with energy circuit language. Then, the solar emergy transformity of each flows was required to transform the original units into the uints of sej. All material and energy flows were quantified in the same uints, i.e., they are converted into emergy flows. Based on the emergy flows of Mine ecosystem, a set of emergy index was established by combining the environmental resouces input, economic system feedback and system output. Main indices results show that: after 2000, the utilization efficiency of material and energy flows in Mine ecosystem increased substantially. On the whole, the utilization efficiency environmental resources and economic feedback in Yaoqiao is better than that in Jisan in recent five years. But the utilization efficiency of feedback from economy in Jisan is 3 times higher than that in Yaoqiao. More economic feedback cost needed in Yaoqiao per 104 tons of coal production output. Environmental resources into the total emergy input in Mine ecosystem accounted for 95%, of which almost all of contributions from the coal seam emergy. Compared to other industries in Xuzhou, for the same economic benefit, the coal mining industry should take more than 4 times the emergy of resources cost. And for one U.S. dollar benefit, more emergy consumed in Jisan than that in Yaoqiao. The loss of water emergy per 104 yuan production value in Jisan is 33% less than that in Yaoqiao. And other results also were gained in chapter 5 of this dissertation.Based on emergy theory and accounting methodology, a set of quantitative methods for accounting the environmental support due to pollutants emission was used to quantifing the negative effects of waste emission from Mine ecosystem. Then, the impacts on environment and effects on human health caused by pollutants emission from coal mining wastes were quantified in unified units.By tracking the material and energy flow with emergy unit, the dissertation achieved using quantitative data analysis the interaction relationship between metabolism and land use and cover change in Mine ecosystem. To be able to measure the extend of colonization of natural processes, the emergy desity was employed. A new ecological footprint model based on emergy theory was also put forward. The new model focused on the ecological carrying capacity and the demand of ecological footprints based on material and energy flows for sustaining regional development.There are 41 figures, 33 tables and 267 References in this dissertation.