This paper summarizes the literature available on biomass cookstoves used in villages of underdeveloped countries to determine their holistic performance, including efficiency and emissions.
Thus, the embodied energy (emergy), that is, the energy used directly or indirectly to make a product or service is a thermodynamic measure of ecological investment or cost, while exergy loss provides a holistic measure of the impact of emissions.
Through the Zero Emissions lens, material cycles from intake to emissions should be managed as a holistic system.
In addition to water quality aspects, costs of water production, fresh water abstraction and CO2-emissions are integrated into a holistic economic assessment of the optimum share of desalinated water in water supplies.
Holistic and integrative approaches combining the reduction of emissions from logging, efficiency in biomass use as well as the efficient use of HWPs are to be implemented as policy measures.
Furthermore, physical intensities (material, energy and emissions) are suitable, but not preferred for holistic industry decompositions, because of the large varieties in physical units involved.
It is important that we look at air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and fuel efficiency of vehicles in a holistic manner".
This study serves as a background to the application of holistic and integrated approaches to modelling the energy and GHG emissions of the food chain.
Accurately accounting for all the new variables being introduced by ever-rising carbon dioxide emissions will, of course, be fundamental to this holistic management approach -- though again, it's all just getting started.
Nonetheless, the study depicted that holistic transportation contributes an average of 11% for life cycle GHG emissions and that red meat is more energy-intensive than other food products.
