Óscar Carpintero

• Universidad de Valladolid
• University of Valladolid

• We point out a Post-normal modelling style in the field of ecological economics. • An overview is provided on new trends of Post-normal modelling in ecological economics. • Post-normal modelling includes guiding principles for the evaluation of models.

In the field of just energy transitions, local scales have been relegated and limited to qualitative approaches with non-specific methods by observation. Local quantitative approaches have gained popularity but remain far from the topic of just transitions and elude rural areas, probably because of data scarcity. Amid the quantitative panoply, syst...

This article reviews the recent contributions of ecological-economic modelling to the general epistemology of scientific models. It focuses, in particular, on the understanding of the process and consequences of modelling offered by ecological-economic modellers, especially by those authors linked to the philosophy of Post-normal science. We point...

Welfare States are considered key tools to provide just transitions. The hypothesis of synergy states that Social-democratic regimes are in a better position to accomplish them. While synergy has been widely theorised, its empirical verification has remained less studied and provided contradictory results. The weaknesses detected in the state-of-th...

This deliverable summarizes the set of tasks carried out by the work package 4 in order to collect the required information for modelling the endogenous climate change and adaptation of the economic system in WILIAM.

León ha experimentado los impactos socioeconómicos negativos del declive de las explotaciones mineras y de la generación eléctrica basada en el carbón sin posibilidad de recurrir a actividades alternativas adecuadas e inmediatas, a pesar de su potencial estratégico energético, tecnológico y productivo para la región. Estos eventos concurren e inter...

The Welfare States are considered key tools to confront the social impacts of the ongoing energy transitions. The hypothesis of synergy states that Social-democratic regimes (Esping-Andersen) are in a better position to reach the Eco-social State, hence supplying justice in the process of transition. While synergy has been widely theorised, its emp...

Dealing with an increasing population is challenging the global food system not only in productive terms, but also through the associated environmental pressures. A growing diagnostic effort is being made by global and national agencies. Innovative approaches are needed to support effective policy efforts. This study aims to illustrate the potentia...

Hace medio siglo que el concepto de “transición energética justa” surgió en el movimiento sindicalista de las refinerías estadounidenses. En estas décadas, ha trascendido sus condiciones originales para convertirse en una noción presente en los debates globales, especialmente alentados por la necesidad de transitar hacia un escenario de neutralidad...

The global environmental and social crisis has motivated the renaissance of just transitions, this time centred around the effects on labour and income distribution of the shift to a sustainable energy mix. This renewed conception has gone beyond its origins in the US unions in the 1970s to become a key element in many discourses worldwide, with di...

Countries worldwide have committed to perform an energy transition to a low carbon scenario by 2050. Not only does it imply radical shifts in energy patterns, but also profound social rearrangements with asymmetric consequences. Focusing on this asymmetry, the notion of just transitions has recently (re)emerged from its unionist roots to grant a li...

This paper reviews different approaches to modelling the energy transition towards a zero carbon economy. It identifies a number of limitations in current approaches such as a lack of consideration of out-of-equilibrium situations (like an energy transition) and non-linear feedbacks. To tackle those issues, the new open source integrated assessment...

This paper reviews different approaches to modelling the energy transition towards a zero carbon economy. It identifies a number of limitations in current approaches such as a lack of consideration of out-of-equilibrium situations (like an energy transition) and non-linear feedbacks. To tackle those issues, the new open source integrated assessment...

A diversity of integrated assessment models (IAMs) coexists due to the different approaches developed to deal with the complex interactions, high uncertainties and knowledge gaps within the environment and human...

Integrated Assessment Models provide a framework to study sustainability transitions and their economic impacts. Models seldom consider energy constraints, taking supply availability for granted and thus suggesting a mere change in the energy mix from non-renewables to renewables. In order to address these limitations, a macro-economic module withi...

A thorough understanding of long-term temporal social-ecological dynamics at the national scale helps to explain the current condition of a country’s ecosystems and to support environmental policies to tackle future sustainability challenges. We aimedcto develop a methodological approach to understand past long-term (1960-2010) social-ecological dy...

A thorough understanding of long-term temporal social-ecological dynamics at the national scale helps to explain the current condition of a country's ecosystems and to support environmental policies to tackle future sustainability challenges. We aimed to develop a methodological approach to understand past long-term (1960-2010) social-ecological dy...

Estas Lecturas de Economía Política, que complementan el Manual de Economía Política publicado simultáneamente, pretenden cubrir las áreas que los Manuales de Economía dejan de lado por falta de espacio o interés. A partir de una pluralidad de enfoques heterodoxos, los autores de este libro toman partido por las más modernas variantes de la concepc...

The literature dedicated to the analysis of the different climate agreements has usually focused on the effectiveness of the aims for emissions in the light of the advance in climate change. This article quantifies the variation in emissions that the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) will entail and their financial allocation and...

In the last decades, taking advantage of the ecomodernist approach to nature conservation and sustainability (the so-called “new conservation”), the ecosystem services have become enormously popular. One controversial aspect, accompanying the raise of this approach, is the monetary valuation of ecosystems and ecosystem services based on an instrume...

This document documents the “World Limits Model” version 1.5 (WoLiM 1.5), reporting the methods, rationale and hypothesis applied. This model is an energy-economy-environment simulation system dynamics model that focus on future energy resource availability and its implications for human socioeconomic systems at world aggregated level. In this vers...

El metabolismo del sistema socioeconómico nos enfrenta a un contexto de crisis socioecológica global en el que confluyen diferentes retos que requieren una decidida y urgente respuesta: la aceleración del cambio climático, la llegada del pico del petróleo y la transición hacia el régimen industrial de algunos de los países más poblados del planeta....

The aim of this paper is to analyse the recent changes in the role played by Africa as a traditional natural resources supplier for the world economy in a multipolar context. We highlight, on the one hand, how Africa remains a prominent supplier of critical minerals needed for information and communication technologies (ICT), including platinum, va...

¿Por qué siempre que se analiza el fenómeno de la corrupción se pone el acen-to en el corrompido y muy poco en el que actúa como corruptor? Este asunto parece relevante, pues, a menudo nos encontramos con que importantes empresas a escala nacional e internacional tienen un papel clave en los proce-sos de corrupción y muy pocas veces aparecen como r...

The focus when analyzing the environmental requirements and impacts of the economic system is usually placed on production activities. But all production is associated with final consumption, and recently many studies have also been dedicated to final consumption. This article comprehensively reviews the biophysical assessment of households from th...

Growing scientific evidence shows that world energy resources are entering a period shaped by the depletion of high-quality fuels, whilst the decline of the easy-to-extract oil is a widely recognized ongoing phenomenon. The end of the era of cheap and abundant energy flows brings the issue of economic growth into question, stimulating research for...

This paper shows how exergy can be used to assess the mineral balance of a country and at the same time assess its mineral resource sustainability. The advantage of using such an approach is that the quality of the resources is taken into account, as opposed to the conventional procedure that uses tonnage as a yardstick. The exergoecology method ev...

This paper explores potential contributions of regional material flow accounting to the characterization of environmental pressures. With this aim, patterns of material extraction, trade, consumption and productivity for the Spanish regions were studied within the 1996-2010 period. The main methodological variation as compared to whole-country base...

Reduced to the isolated universe of monetary value, the conventional economic approach circumscribes the economic dynamics affecting territories, such as the relationships between them, to a set of flows solely expressed in monetary terms. This one-dimensional view disconnects the economic system from the social, physical and territorial world in s...

This paper describes a way to account for mineral depletion through exergy replacement costs, which are defined as the exergy required to replace minerals from a complete dispersed state back to the initial conditions of composition and concentration in which they were originally found and with the best available technologies. The advantage of usin...

The progressive reduction of high-quality-easy-to-extract energy is a widely recognized and already ongoing process. Although depletion studies for individual fuels are relatively abundant, few of them offer a global perspective of all energy sources and their potential future developments, and even fewer include the demand of the socio-economic sy...

The Spanish National Ecosystem Assessment (SNEA), supported by the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of Environment, is the first analysis conducted on the status and trends of ecosystem services in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of Spain. The results of the SNEA are expected to help build bridges between interdisciplinary scientific know...

Reduced to the isolated universe of monetary value, the conventional economic approach circumscribes the economic dynamics affecting territories, such as the relationships between them, to a set of flows solely expressed in monetary terms. This one-dimensional view disconnects the economic system from the social, physical and territorial world in s...

The aim of this article is to analyse the physical and ecological limits of biofuels (in particular, ethanol). To this end, three aspects are discussed. First of all, the territorial element, i.e., the real productivity of energy crops (in particular, ethanol), to show that, in general, the productivity is much lower than most of the literature on...

Although economists have often disagreed on economic aspects of global warming, views, such as those expressed in the Stern Review, which purports global warming as a major economic problem carrying risks of disaster and demanding the use of major resources, are increasingly common. The idea that with development and technological progress, total g...

Modern ecological economics emerged in opposition to mainstream economics as a scientific approach with many key heterodox features. Among these are an open systems perspective, transdisciplinarity, and radical criticism of the conventional representation of economic process. The term “ecological economics” was included internationally in the secon...

Volcanic eruptions, the El Ni??o Southern oscillation (ENSO), world population, and the world economy are the four variables usually discussed as influencing the short-run changes in CO2 atmospheric levels through their influence on CO2 emissions and sinks. Using proper procedures of detrending, we do not find any observable relation between the sh...

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 grew annually 1.12 +- 0.48 parts per million (ppm) in 1958-1984, and 1.72 +- 0.54 ppm (mean +- standard deviation) in 1985-2009, so that the rate growth is growing itself. Natural phenomena that influence short-run changes in CO2 atmospheric levels (through their influence on CO2 emissions and sinks) are stationary...

La biodiversidad es esencial para la supervivencia del ser humano en la Tierra. Del buen funcionamiento de los ecosistemas acuáticos y terrestres españoles y de la biodiversidad que albergan, depende en buena medida el futuro social, cultural y económico de la población, ya que constituyen el capital natural de nuestro país. El bienestar humano en...

Resumen En este trabajo se realiza una evaluación de la sostenibilidad ambiental de la economía espa-ñola utilizando el enfoque y las herramientas propias de la economía ecológica. Arranca de una concepción de la sostenibilidad como una cuestión de escala, es decir, del tamaño que el sistema económico ocupa dentro de esa biosfera y de la capacidad...

La apropiación humana de producción primaria neta (AHPPN) como aproximación al metabolismo económico. La economía ecológica entiende que el sistema económico es un subsistema dentro de un sistema más amplio como es la biosfera, y la sostenibilidad debe ser vista como una cuestión de escala o tamaño del sistema económico dentro de esa Biosfera. Una...

Resumen Es cierto que el grueso de las reflexiones sobre las relaciones economía-naturaleza en España se han producido sobre todo desde finales de los años setenta. Ahora bien, en el segundo tercio del siglo XX, se pueden encontrar algunas interesantes reflexiones económico-ecológicas de autores ortodoxos (Perpiñá i Grau, Torres o Valentín Andrés Á...

Ecological economics points out that the economy has to be seen as a sub-system of the environment and sustainability is basically a "scale issue", that is, it refers to the size occupied by the economic system inside the Biosphere. This "scale" can be measured in physical terms, i.e., by quantifying the flows of energy, materials and wastes that c...

Al cierre del año 2002, el 80% del patrimonio total de las familias españolas estaba invertido en activos no financieros, básicamente inmobiliarios, y solo el 20% en activos financieros. En 1998, estas proporciones eran del 71% y 29% respectivamente. La negativa evolución de los precios de los activos financieros y el paralelo ascenso de las valora...

En este trabajo se pretende llamar la atención sobre las servidumbres ambientales que ha conllevado el crecimiento económico en España durante el último medio siglo, habida cuenta de que el enfoque económico ordinaria, al centrar la reflexión sobre las "fuentes del crecimiento" en el trabajo, el capital a la tecnología, suele hacer abstracción de l...

En el debate sobre la sostenibilidad ambiental, el tradicional predominio del sector servicios, y más recientemente la nueva economía, Ira llevado a afirmar que, al ser éstos "menos intensivos" en la utilización de energía y materiales, cabria la posibilidad de mantener el actual modelo de crecimiento sin atender a los costes ambientales que provoc...