Extended exergy accounting for assessing the sustainability of agriculture: A case study of Hebei Province, China

Along with the growing demand and improving diet, the agricultural sector faces challenges in balancing resource consumption, environmental impacts and yields. This study presents an extended exergy accounting to capture the changing characteristics of the usefulness of resources in the agricultural sector of Hebei Province during 2000–2018 from thermodynamics perspective. The accounting includes exergy fluxes of energy, materials, environmental remediation, labor, capital and yields quantified by joules. The agricultural sector of Hebei Province comprising the cropping, forestry, stockbreeding and fishery sub industries, has experienced transformation into a modern pattern. The results showed that (1) the extended exergy in the agricultural sector of Hebei Province exhibited a declining trend; the natural resource exergy, particularly energy exergy, dominated the investments in the sector. (2) The capital exergy, labor exergy and environmental remediation exergy all decreased; the capital exergy and labor exergy decreased more than the environmental remediation exergy. The shares of the labor exergy from the services of agriculture declined, while those of the labor exergy from forestry and stockbreeding notably increased. (3) Since the cropping accounts for a large part of the yields, the large quantity of crop residues should be considered seriously. The potential of the other three sub industries was very high. The comparison between the agricultural sector in Hebei Province and that in China as a whole involving exergy indicators showed that Hebei Province was more modernized and had achieved great progresses. Extended exergy accounting captures the agro ecological economic system to help identify resource depletion and environmental costs in other areas or industries from a sustainable development perspective.