Multiple-Scale Integrated Assessments of Societal Metabolism: Integrating Biophysical and Economic Representations Across Scales

The crucial challenge for integrated analyses of socioeconomic systems is keeping coherence in their multidimensional representation. Our approach describes the hierarchical structure of socioeconomic systems using the profile of allocation of human activity over a set of compartments defined at different hierarchical levels (e.g., whole countries, economic sectors, individual households). Compartments are characterized in terms of intensive variables (intensity of both exosomatic energy flows and added value flows per unit of human activity) and the extensive variable Total Human Activity population. In this way, relations of congruence across hierarchical levels can be used to link non-equivalent analyses. That is, changes in demographic variables, economic variables, technical coefficients, indices of environmental loading, institutional settings, and social aspirations are no longer independent of each-other even if described within different scientific disciplines.