Some authors suggested the combined use of emergy and spatial
information, highlighting how the spatial dimension can be useful for
environmental decision-making. Agostinho et al. (2008) combined GIS
and emergy assessment to compare the environmental performance
of small family farms in Brazil. Pulselli (2010) integrated emergy flows
into GIS to represent their spatial distribution throughout the Abruzzo
Region (Italy) and to assess environmental resources use by local
communities. Coscieme et al. (2013b) showed that the non-renewable
fraction of national emergy use is correlated with nighttime satellite
imagery and this relationship can be used to produce emergy density
maps thus including spatially representations of emergy in geographic
information systems. Similarly, Mellino et al. (2013) related the nonrenewable
resources used within the Campania region economy
expressed in terms of emergy convergence per area (areal nonrenewable
empower density) to nighttime satellite images via GIS technology
to investigate the hierarchical spatial patterns of non-renewable
resource consumption and to describe the human disturbance gradient
throughout the regional landscapes. Mellino et al. (2014) proposed integration
between emergy assessment and GIS in order to quantify and
map the distribution of renewable flows (solar insolation, wind, geothermal
heat and rainfall) developing a tool for describing the environmental
worth of lands. The cited works bring out that integration of
emergy within a GIS framework offers the added value of going beyond
the simple, though useful, description of resources as such, and allows
one to characterize resource quality by their convergence patterns and
biosphere support concentration over time and space. Nevertheless, it is
essential to standardize spatial assessments in emergy in order to achieve
more transparency and credibility of the methodological approach, while
138 S. Mellino et al. / Science of the Total Environment 506–507 (2015) 137–148improving the UEV quality and refining the detail of outputs for local policy
support.
In this study, we use the emergy theory to account for the natural
capital and compare it with the human-made capital of the Campania
region (southern Italy). The emergy accounting method is used to
value these storages of capital using a common unit, the solar equivalent
joule (seJ). The method accounts for the environmental support provided
directly and indirectly by nature to resource generation and processing;
it focuses on valuation of the intrinsic properties of ecosystems.
Furthermore, the geographic information system (GIS) tool is used to
provide insightful perspectives of the emergy evaluation of natural
capital. GIS models are used to generate maps allowing the assessment
of the spatial patterns of natural and human-made capital distribution