MET Rapid Test

Tourism plays an increasingly critical role in national and urban economies. While tourist spending particularly benefits urban economies, the growth of urban tourism has gradually intensified cities' reliance on external resources and significantly influenced resource-supplying areas. This study adopts the concept of urban land teleconnections (ULTs) to discuss how the cultural ecosystem services in the tourism industry have affected distant areas in general and how the increased tourist flow has intensified Taipei's dependence on external resources and challenged its urban sustainability in particular. An emergy-based analysis is conducted to evaluate the contribution of material flows triggered by urban tourism into the urban ecological-economic system and to demonstrate how urban tourism has increased the city's reliance on external distant areas. The analysis highlights the biophysical value created by external resources in the economic system. Driven by growing urban tourism during 2000-2016, Taipei witnessed considerable material inflow, including construction materials for newly built hotels, gasoline for sightseeing buses, food for tourists, and money through retail consumption. These material inflows are converted into emergy flows to analyze the effects of tourism-driven material flows on urban sustainability. The results show that emergy inflows driven by urban tourism considerably increased the flow of construction materials needed to build hotels to meet tourists' accommodation needs. As a result, the total emergy driven by Taipei tourism increased fifteen-fold since 2000 and crested in 2015. However, the demand for tourism-related resources triggered changes in land use and land cover in distant resource-supplying areas. Such ULTs further contributed to unequal ecological exchanges. Our findings highlight the need for urban sustain ability assessments to account for the impact of ULTs driven by urban tourism on distant resource-supplying areas. In addition, tourism planning and management should not be a facet but a core element of urban planning objectives.

Greenhouse gas emissions related to food production in selected countries around the world in 2000, 2007, and 2014 were analyzed in this paper. In recent decades, many studies have suggested that greenhouse gas emissions mostly caused by agricultural production should be reduced. However, a low-carbon agricultural sector often involves a reduction in inputs, which may result in smaller production volumes. Nevertheless, the overarching goal should be to maintain food production at a sufficient level to meet the population's food requirements. Food production is particularly important in the context of the forecasted growth of the world population. In this situation, greenhouse gas emissions per product unit should be regarded as a key indicator that reflects the environmental sustainability level of production processes. Defined as such, environmental sustainability was examined across the entire food production systemdreferred to as agribusiness. This study calculated the emissions of major greenhouse gases related to food production and compared them to the GDP of agribusiness. The average ratio of the agribusiness carbon footprint to GDP in countries examined was nearly 2 kg of CO2 equivalent/USD in 2000. This value kept decreasing during the study period, reaching 1.21 in 2014. A decrease in the ratio was recorded despite an increase in agribusiness greenhouse gas emissions, which validated the research hypothesis that an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from agribusiness does not necessarily reflect a decline in the environmental performance of agribusiness production. This is especially true for China and Brazil, whose greenhouse gas emissions related to food production increased considerably in the years examined in this study along with a clear decline in emission levels per unit of agribusiness GDP. This study is innovative, because the literature does not provide any similar calculations for the food production subsystem, especially regarding emission levels per production unit. This approach required the authors to integrate the calculation methods used in agribusiness production with those applicable to agribusiness greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, this study relied on consistent methods developed by the authors to calculate these values. The research adds to existing literature by calculating the carbon footprint for the entire food production system, and it argues that better environmental performance of agribusiness production can be achieved despite higher greenhouse gas emissions. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.